ung woman! It
was queer.

Mr. Emerson never forgot Miss Evans of Coventry, and ten years after,
when a zealous reviewer proclaimed her the greatest novelist in England,
the sage of Concord said something that sounded like "I told you so."

Miss Evans had made visits to London from time to time with her Coventry
friends. When twenty-eight years old, after one such visit to London, she
came back to the country tired and weary, and wrote this most womanly
wish: "My only ardent desire is to find some feminine task to discharge;
some possibility of devoting myself to some one and making that one
purely and calmly happy."

But now her father was dead and her income was very scanty. She did
translating, and tried the magazines with articles that generally came
back respectfully declined.

Then an offer came as sub-editor of the "Westminster Review." It was
steady work and plenty of it, and this was what she desired. She went to
London and lived in the household of her employer, Mr. Chapman. Here she
had the opportunity of meeting many brilliant people: Carlyle and his
"Jeannie Welsh," the Martineaus, Grote, Mr. and Mrs. Mill, Huxley,
Mazzini, Louis Blanc. Besides these were two young men who must not be
left out when we sum up the influences that evolved this woman's genius.

She was attracted to Herbert Spencer at once. He was about her age, and
their admiration for each other was mutual. Miss Evans, writing to a
friend in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, says, "Spencer is kind, he is
delightful, and I always feel better after being with him, and we have
agreed together that there is no reason why we should not see each other
as often as we wish." And then later she again writes: "The bright side
of my life, after the affection for my old friends, is the new and
delightful friendship which I have found in Herbert Spencer. We see each
other every day, and in everything we enjoy a delightful comradeship. If
it were not for him my life would be singularly arid."

But about this time another man appeared on the scene, and were it not
for this other man, who was introduced to Miss Evans by Spencer, the
author of "Synthetic Philosophy" might not now be spoken of in the
biographical dictionaries as having been "wedded to science."

It was not love at first sight, for George Henry Lewes made a decidedly
unfavorable impression on Miss Evans at their first meeting. He was
small, his features were insignificant, he had whiskers like a