quieter years when she spent her time chiefly at
Berlin, Geneva, and Paris, forming in these places a large circle of
acquaintances among the most revolutionary spirits of Europe. By and by
they, mother and son, came back to London, but so changed--she in
thought and speech, he in all things--that their old friends and
kindred scarce knew how, comfortably, to maintain any intercourse with
them, and the son, at least, seemed to desire that all old ties should
be snapped asunder. The mother was for ever declaiming vague,
inconsequent tirades against all things that are; the son was cynical,
rough, disagreeable to an insufferable extent, and in their
drawing-rooms a quiet, _borne_ old friend was sure to encounter a
tremendous procession of the emancipated--the reddest of reds, unwashed
agitators of all tongues and hues, aggressive free-thinkers, poets
screaming mad indecencies and blasphemies to vindicate the office of
art; women whose mission it was, by nude dancing, posing, acting, to
educate humanity and lift it to that plane whereon to the pure all
things are pure; men of science standing on dreary pedestals of comely
things they have shattered--a procession, in short, no one of whose
members the humdrum old acquaintance would care to face a second time.

"More discouraging than all was a story that began to be whispered
among the people who had known the family most intimately in the
earlier days--the story of a young girl, a distant connection of Lady
----'s husband, who had been left an orphan when only a child, almost
friendless and quite penniless, and had been, thanks to Lady ----, most
carefully trained abroad to fill the position of musical governess, the
girl having extraordinary aptitude for music. Her studies over, she
accompanied Lady ---- during a year or two of her later wanderings on
the continent, and returned with her to London, where she soon obtained
several good teaching engagements, and sang with great success at
concerts during one season. A very pretty, winning creature she was,
Mr. Feldwick said: a dark, rich-tinted face, where every emotion
mirrored itself, and a manner as joyous, impulsive, frank as a child's,
joined to the caressing coquetry of a Frenchwoman. She spoke three or
four languages as well as English; her dancing was a thing to see in
this awkward island; and the child was altogether so fresh and sweet
that no one wondered that Lady ---- insisted that her _protegee_ must
not think