invited out to dinner. She got rather a
reputation for the management of elderly distinguished men. It was an
odd experience to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some
big drawing-room and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack
transformed into a shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and
ivory-white and lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.

For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professed
an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my views and sought
me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to link us
closelier. She would come up to the office, and sit by the window,
and talk over the proofs of the next week's articles, going through my
intentions with a keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me in
mind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she had
a wit and a turn of the phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have
forgotten the little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our
last meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in
those days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.

We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or so,
and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things were not
keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocently
mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a monstrous and
engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to have her as my pupil.
Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at that distance for a long
time--until within a year of the Handitch election.

After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less formal
and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their cousin
Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them in
Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men who came a
little timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and
the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with
manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship
that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy
and shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of
helping him to find his soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that.
I didn't see the necessity of him. He invaded her time,