into his arms and to call her soul into her eyes; or, if a
letter were to come from him asking her to dinner, she would accept it;
and, lying back among her silken cushions, she thinks she could spend
many hours in his company without weariness. She creates his rooms and
his person and his conversation, and when he is exhausted a new intrigue
rises up in her mind, and then another and another. Some drop away and
remain for ever unfulfilled, while others 'come into their own,' as the
saying is.

If this be a true analysis of a woman's life--and who will say it is
not?--the dreams of the Marchioness of Kilcarney would begin in her
easy-chair about the second spring after her marriage, the shaggy shape
that haunts the back of my mind would hear her dreams, and the wooing
that began with the daffodils would continue always, for she is a woman
that could keep a lover till the end of time. At her death husband and
lover would visit her grave together and talk of her perfections in the
winter evenings. But if Violet did not die another vagrant male would
steal through the ilex-trees, a hunter in pursuit of game, or else it
might be a fisher, seated among the rocks waiting, for tunny-fish.
Either might take Violet's fancy. The author of _Muslin_ seems to have
entertained a thought of some such pastoral frolic in the Shelbourne
Hotel--the opposition of husband and lover to the newcomer, Harding,
whom it had occurred to Mrs. Barton to invite to Brookfield, and whom
she would have invited had it not been for her great matrimonial
projects; my forerunner, who was an artist, saw that any deflection of
Mrs. Barton's thoughts would jeopardize his composition, and he allowed
Mrs. Barton to remain a chaperon. He was right in this, but Violet
should have been the impulse and nucleus of a new story. . . . I began to
think suddenly of the blight that would fall on the twain if Violet's
lover were to die, and to figure them sitting in the evenings meditating
on the admirable qualities of the deceased till in their loneliness he
would come to seem to them as a being more than human, touching almost
on the Divine. Their ears would retain the sound of his voice, and the
familiar furniture would provoke remembrances of him. Ashamed of their
weakness, their eyes would seek the chair he used to sit in: it is away
in a far corner, lest a casual visitor should draw it forward and defile
it with his presence--a thing that happened once (the unhappy t