s a new-laid egg, as light as a feather,
as strong as a mail-phaeton. She is perfectly mild, yet she is clever
enough to be sharp if she would. I don't know that clever women are
necessarily thought ill-natured, but it is usually taken for granted
that amiable women are very limited. Lady Tester is a refutation of the
theory, which must have been invented by a vixenish woman who was _not_
clever. She has an adoration for her husband, which absorbs her without
in the least making her silly, unless indeed it is silly to be modest,
as in this brutal world I sometimes believe. Her modesty is so great
that being unhappy has hitherto presented itself to her as a form of
egotism,--that egotism which she has too much delicacy to cultivate. She
is by no means sure that if being married to her beautiful baronet is
not the ideal state she dreamed it, the weak point of the affair is not
simply in her own presumption. It does n't express her condition, at
present, to say that she is unhappy or disappointed, or that she has a
sense of injury. All this is latent; meanwhile, what is obvious, is that
she is bewildered,--she simply does n't understand; and her perplexity,
to me, is unspeakably touching. She looks about her for some
explanation, some light. She fixes her eyes on mine sometimes, and on
those of other people, with a kind of searching dumbness, as if there
were some chance that I--that they--may explain, may tell her what it is
that has happened to her. I can explain very well, but not to her,--only
to you!

III.

It was a brilliant match for Miss Bernardstone, who had no fortune at
all, and all her friends were of the opinion that she had done very well
After Easter she was in London with her people, and I saw a good deal
of them, in fact, I rather cultivated them. They might perhaps even have
thought me a little patronizing, if they had been given to thinking that
sort of thing. But they were not; that is not in their line. English
people are very apt to attribute motives,--some of them attribute much
worse ones than we poor simpletons in America recognize, than we have
even heard of! But that is only some of them; others don't, but
take everything literally and genially. That was the case with the
Bernardstones; you could be sure that on their way home, after dining
with you, they would n't ask each other how in the world any one could
call you pretty, or say that many people _did_ believe, all the same,
that you