g there was nothing dreamy. Isabel
learned from her friend that the two had led a life of great personal
intimacy and that this had been a peculiar advantage to Henrietta,
owing to the gentleman's remarkable knowledge of Paris. He had
explained everything, shown her everything, been her constant guide and
interpreter. They had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to
the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived
together. He was a true friend, Henrietta more than once assured our
heroine; and she had never supposed that she could like any Englishman
so well. Isabel could not have told you why, but she found something
that ministered to mirth in the alliance the correspondent of the
Interviewer had struck with Lady Pensil's brother; her amusement
moreover subsisted in face of the fact that she thought it a credit to
each of them. Isabel couldn't rid herself of a suspicion that they were
playing somehow at cross-purposes--that the simplicity of each had
been entrapped. But this simplicity was on either side none the less
honourable. It was as graceful on Henrietta's part to believe that Mr.
Bantling took an interest in the diffusion of lively journalism and in
consolidating the position of lady-correspondents as it was on the
part of his companion to suppose that the cause of the Interviewer--a
periodical of which he never formed a very definite conception--was, if
subtly analysed (a task to which Mr. Bantling felt himself quite equal),
but the cause of Miss Stackpole's need of demonstrative affection. Each
of these groping celibates supplied at any rate a want of which the
other was impatiently conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of rather a slow
and a discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who
charmed him by the influence of a shining, challenging eye and a kind of
bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind
to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other
hand, enjoyed the society of a gentleman who appeared somehow, in his
way, made, by expensive, roundabout, almost "quaint" processes, for
her use, and whose leisured state, though generally indefensible, was a
decided boon to a breathless mate, and who was furnished with an easy,
traditional, though by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any social
or practical question that could come up. She often found Mr. Bantling's
answers very convenient, and in the press of catching