that he thought at these moments of Isabel. To think of Isabel
could only be for him an idle pursuit, leading to nothing and profiting
little to any one. His cousin had not yet seemed to him so charming
as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps
and shallows of the metropolitan element. Isabel was full of premises,
conclusions, emotions; if she had come in search of local colour she
found it everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and
launched brave theories, as to historic cause and social effect, that he
was equally unable to accept or to refute. The party went more than once
to the British Museum and to that brighter palace of art which reclaims
for antique variety so large an area of a monotonous suburb; they spent
a morning in the Abbey and went on a penny-steamer to the Tower; they
looked at pictures both in public and private collections and sat
on various occasions beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens.
Henrietta proved an indestructible sight-seer and a more lenient judge
than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments,
and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of the strong
points of the American civic idea; but she made the best of its dingy
dignities and only heaved an occasional sigh and uttered a desultory
"Well!" which led no further and lost itself in retrospect. The truth
was that, as she said herself, she was not in her element. "I've not a
sympathy with inanimate objects," she remarked to Isabel at the National
Gallery; and she continued to suffer from the meagreness of the glimpse
that had as yet been vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes
by Turner and Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary
dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius and renown of
Great Britain.

"Where are your public men, where are your men and women of intellect?"
she enquired of Ralph, standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square as
if she had supposed this to be a place where she would naturally meet a
few. "That's one of them on the top of the column, you say--Lord Nelson.
Was he a lord too? Wasn't he high enough, that they had to stick him a
hundred feet in the air? That's the past--I don't care about the past; I
want to see some of the leading minds of the present. I won't say of the
future, because I don't believe much in your future." Poor Ralph had few
leading minds among his acquaintance and rarely enj