iting,
which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel
sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant
or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars or
any sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base
of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of
personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hours
exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a
gypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
the early nineties she met and married Bailey.

I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of
Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton,
and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King
prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable
independence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of the
little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic
activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry
Ward--the Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with distinguished vigour,
which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiences
as an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about the
problem--which is and always had been unusual. She had not married, I
suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an
instinctive appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father
by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful
manner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a writer
upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation
Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends when
she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The
lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision
with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and
authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of
imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps
carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate
him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject
humility and a certain panic at her attention