privacy of his own apartment, when Bantling smoked
a cigar there, indulged in goodness knew what strong comedy on the
subject of the all-judging one and her British backer. This gentleman
took the joke in perfectly good part and candidly confessed that he
regarded the affair as a positive intellectual adventure. He liked
Miss Stackpole extremely; he thought she had a wonderful head on her
shoulders, and found great comfort in the society of a woman who was not
perpetually thinking about what would be said and how what she did, how
what they did--and they had done things!--would look. Miss Stackpole
never cared how anything looked, and, if she didn't care, pray why
should he? But his curiosity had been roused; he wanted awfully to see
if she ever WOULD care. He was prepared to go as far as she--he didn't
see why he should break down first.

Henrietta showed no signs of breaking down. Her prospects had brightened
on her leaving England, and she was now in the full enjoyment of her
copious resources. She had indeed been obliged to sacrifice her hopes
with regard to the inner life; the social question, on the Continent,
bristled with difficulties even more numerous than those she had
encountered in England. But on the Continent there was the outer
life, which was palpable and visible at every turn, and more easily
convertible to literary uses than the customs of those opaque islanders.
Out of doors in foreign lands, as she ingeniously remarked, one seemed
to see the right side of the tapestry; out of doors in England one
seemed to see the wrong side, which gave one no notion of the figure.
The admission costs her historian a pang, but Henrietta, despairing of
more occult things, was now paying much attention to the outer life. She
had been studying it for two months at Venice, from which city she sent
to the Interviewer a conscientious account of the gondolas, the Piazza,
the Bridge of Sighs, the pigeons and the young boatman who chanted
Tasso. The Interviewer was perhaps disappointed, but Henrietta was at
least seeing Europe. Her present purpose was to get down to Rome before
the malaria should come on--she apparently supposed that it began on a
fixed day; and with this design she was to spend at present but few days
in Florence. Mr. Bantling was to go with her to Rome, and she pointed
out to Isabel that as he had been there before, as he was a military man
and as he had had a classical education--he had been bred at Eton,