ot a case for anything so ordinary as approval,
or anything so personal as liking; it was a matter of
observation, enjoyment, stimulus. He availed himself of
these abstractions with a candor that was the more open
for not being complicated with any less hardy motive. He
had long ago decided that relations of sentiment with
Elfrida would require a temperament quite different from
that of any man he knew. It was entirely otherwise with
Janet Cardiff, and Kendal smiled as he thought of the
feminine variation the two girls illustrated. He had a
distinct recollection of one crisp October afternoon
before he went to Paris, as they walked home together
under the brown curling leaves and passed the Serpentine,
when he had found that the old charm of Janet's gray eyes
was changing to a new one. He remembered the pleasure he
had felt in dallying with the thought of making them
lustrous, one day, with tenderness for himself. It had
paled since then, there had been so many other things;
but still they were dear, honest eyes--and Kendal never
brought his reverie to a conclusion under any circumstances
whatever.

CHAPTER XIX.

I have mentioned that Miss Bell had looked considerations
of sentiment very full in the face at an age when she
might have been expected to be blushing and quivering
before them, with downcast countenance. She had arrived
at conclusions about them--conclusions of philosophic
contumely, indifference, and some contempt. She had since
frequently talked about them to Janet Cardiff with curious
disregard of time, and circumstance, mentioning her
opinion in a Strand omnibus, for instance, that the only
dignity attaching to love as between a man and a woman
was that of an artistic idea. Janet had found Elfrida
possessed of so savage a literalism in this regard that
it was only in the most hardily adventurous of the moods
of investigation her friend inspired that she cared to
combat her here. It was not, Janet told herself, that
she was afraid to face the truth in any degree of nakedness;
but she rose in hot inward rebellion against Elfrida's
borrowed psychological cynicisms--they were not the truth,
Tolstoi had not all the facts, perhaps from pure Muscovite
inability to comprehend them all The spirituality of love
might be a western product--she was half inclined to
think it was; but at all events it existed, and it was
wanton to leave out of consideration a thing that made
all the difference. Moreover