y
the roses are beginning to pour over the walls; the wistaria is climbing
up the cypresses; a pomp of camellias and azaleas is in all the gardens;
while in the grassy bays that run up into the hills the primrose banks
still keep their sweet austerity, and the triumph of spring over the
just banished winter is still sharp and new.

And in the heart and sense of Julie Le Breton, as she sat beside the
Duchess, listening absently to the talk of the old boatman, who, with
his oars resting idly in his hands, was chattering to the ladies, a
renewing force akin to that of the spring was also at its healing and
life-giving work. She had still the delicate, tremulous look of one
recovering from a sore wrestle with physical ill; but in her aspect
there were suggestions more intimate, more moving than this. Those who
have lain down and risen up with pain; those who have been face to face
with passion and folly and self-judgment; those who have been forced to
seek with eagerness for some answer to those questions which the
majority of us never ask, "Whither is my life leading me--and what is it
worth to me or to any other living soul?"--these are the men and women
who now and then touch or startle us with the eyes and the voice of
Julie, if, at least, we have the capacity that responds. Sir Wilfrid
Bury, for instance, prince of self-governed and reasonable men, was not
to be touched by Julie. For him, in spite of her keen intelligence, she
was the _type passionne_, from which he instinctively recoiled--the Duke
of Crowborough the same. Such men feel towards such women as Julie Le
Breton hostility or satire; for what they ask, above all, of the women
of their world is a kind of simplicity, a kind of lightness which makes
life easier for men.

But for natures like Evelyn Crowborough--or Meredith--or Jacob
Delafield--the Julie-type has perennial attractions. For these are all
_children of feeling_, allied in this, however different in intelligence
or philosophy. They are attracted by the storm-tossed temperament in
itself; by mere sensibility; by that which, in the technical language of
Catholicism, suggests or possesses "the gift of tears." At any rate,
pity and love for her poor Julie--however foolish, however faulty--lay
warm in Evelyn Crowborough's breast; they had brought her to Como; they
kept her now battling on the one hand with her husband's angry letters
and on the other with the melancholy of her most perplexing, most
app