London
in June, and Elfrida conjuring with the name of the
_Illustrated Age_, won an appointment from her. The
artiste staid only a fortnight--she declared that one
half of an English audience came to see her because it
was proper and the other because it was sinful, and she
found it insupportable--and in that time she asked Elfrida
three times to pay her morning visits, when she appeared
in her dressing-gown, little unconventional visits "_pour
bavarder_." When Miss Bell lacked entertainment during the
weeks that followed she thought of these visits, and little
smiles chased each other round the corners of her mouth.

She wrote to Janet when she was in the mood--delicious
scraps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so
far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in
wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that
shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of
its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not
write at all. With an instinctive recognition of the
demands of any relation such as she felt her friendship
with Janet Cardiff to be, she simply refrained, from
imposing upon her anything that savored of dullness or
commonplaceness. So that sometimes she wrote three or
four times in a week and sometimes not at all for a
fortnight, sometimes covered pages and sometimes sent
three lines and a row of asterisks. There was a fancifulness
in the hour as well, that usually made itself felt all
through the letter--it was rainy twilight in her garret,
or a gray wideness was creeping up behind St Paul's,
which meant that it was morning. To what she herself was
actually doing, or to any material fact about her, they
made the very slightest reference. Janet, in Scotland,
perceived half of this, and felt aggrieved on the score
of the other half. She wished, more often than she said
she did, that Elfrida were a little more human, that she
had a more appreciative understanding of the warm value
of common every-day matters between people who were
interested in one another. The subtle imprisoned soul in
Elfrida's letters always spoke to hers, but Janet never
received so artistic a missive of three lines that she
did not wish it were longer, and she had no fund of
confidence to draw on to meet her friend's incomprehensible
spaces of silence. To cover her real soreness she scolded,
chaffed brusquely, affected lofty sarcasms.

"Twelve days ago," she wrote, "you mentioned casually
that yo