well. Even I, who so loved
and revered Mr. Selby,--I, whose childhood was admitted into his
companionship by that love which places ignorance and knowledge, infancy
and age, upon ground so equal that heart touches heart, cannot say that
I understand the English character to anything like the extent to which
I fancy I understand the Italian and the French. Between us of the
Continent and them of the island the British Channel always flows. There
is an Englishman here to whom I have been introduced, whom I have met,
though but seldom, in that society which bounds the Paris world to me.
Pray, pray tell me, did you ever know, ever meet him? His name is Graham
Vane. He is the only son, I am told, of a man who was a celebrite in
England as an orator and statesman, and on both sides he belongs to the
haute aristocratic. He himself has that indescribable air and mien to
which we apply the epithet 'distinguished.' In the most crowded salon
the eye would fix on him, and involuntarily follow his movements.
Yet his manners are frank and simple, wholly without the stiffness or
reserve which are said to characterize the English. There is an inborn
dignity in his bearing which consists in the absence of all dignity
assumed. But what strikes me most in this Englishman is an expression
of countenance which the English depict by the word 'open,'--that
expression which inspires you with a belief in the existence of
sincerity. Mrs. Morley said of him, in that poetic extravagance of
phrase by which the Americans startle the English, "That man's forehead
would light up the Mammoth Cave." Do you not know, Eulalie, what it
is to us cultivators of art--art being the expression of truth through
fiction--to come into the atmosphere of one of those souls in which
Truth stands out bold and beautiful in itself, and needs no idealization
through fiction? Oh, how near we should be to heaven could we live
daily, hourly, in the presence of one the honesty of whose word we could
never doubt, the authority of whose word we could never disobey! Mr.
Vane professes not to understand music, not even to care for it, except
rarely, and yet he spoke of its influence over others with an enthusiasm
that half charmed me once more back to my destined calling; nay, might
have charmed me wholly, but that he seemed to think that I--that any
public singer--must be a creature apart from the world,--the world in
which such men live. Perhaps that is true.

CHAPTER II