his process gave their principal interest to the next several
months. Mrs. Brash had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year,
and her little wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the
features of the following season. It was at all events for myself the
most attaching; it's not my fault if I am so put together as often to
find more life in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than
in the gross rattle of the foreground. And there were all sorts of
things, things touching, amusing, mystifying--and above all such an
instance as I had never yet met--in this funny little fortune of the
useful American cousin. Mrs. Munden was promptly at one with me as to
the rarity and, to a near and human view, the beauty and interest of the
position. We had neither of us ever before seen that degree and that
special sort of personal success come to a woman for the first time so
late in life. I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive
justice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on those
lines. I had seen it all from the original moment at my studio; the poor
lady had never known an hour's appreciation--which moreover, in perfect
good faith, she had never missed. The very first thing I did after
inducing so unintentionally the resentful retreat of her protectress had
been to go straight over to her and say almost without preliminaries that
I should hold myself immeasurably obliged for a few patient sittings.
What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her whole
unenlightened past and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what
among us all was now unfailingly in store for her. To turn the handle
and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation. Here was a
poor lady who had waited for the approach of old age to find out what she
was worth. Here was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in
her fifty-seventh year--I was to make that out--that she had something
that might pass for a face. She looked much more than her age, and was
fairly frightened--as if I had been trying on her some possibly heartless
London trick--when she had taken in my appeal. That showed me in what an
air she had lived and--as I should have been tempted to put it had I
spoken out--among what children of darkness. Later on I did them more
justice; saw more that her wonderful points must have been points largely
the fruit of time, and even that possibly she migh