ted my very ordinary workaday eyes
with a strange magnetic attraction, availed nothing; I was at once
recognized; and, I may remark in passing, an uncommonly disagreeable
fellow she made me. Thus I had passed through the fire. I felt
tolerably sure that I presented no other aspect of interest, real or
supposed, and I was quite content that Miss Liston should serve all the
rest of her acquaintance as she had served me. I reckoned they would
last her, at the present rate of production, about five years.

Fate was kind to Miss Liston, and provided her with most suitable
patterns for her next piece of work at Poltons itself. There were a
young man and a young woman staying in the house--Sir Gilbert
Chillington and Miss Pamela Myles. The moment Miss Liston was apprized
of a possible romance, she began the study of the protagonists. She
was looking out, she told me, for some new types (if it were any
consolation--and there is a sort of dignity about it--to be called a
type, Miss Liston's victims were always welcome to so much), and she
had found them in Chillington and Pamela. The former appeared to my
dull eye to offer no salient novelty; he was tall, broad, handsome, and
he possessed a manner of enviable placidity. Pamela, I allowed, was
exactly the heroine Miss Liston loved--haughty, capricious, difficile,
but sound and true at heart (I was mentally skimming Volume I). Miss
Liston agreed with me in my conception of Pamela, but declared that I
did not do justice to the artistic possibilities latent in Chillington;
he had a curious attraction which it would tax her skill (so she
gravely informed me) to the utmost to reproduce. She proposed that I
also should make a study of him, and attributed my hurried refusal to a
shrinking from the difficulties of the task.

"Of course," she observed, looking at our young friends, who were
talking nonsense at the other side of the lawn, "they must have a
misunderstanding."

"Why, of course," said I, lighting my pipe. "What should you say to
another man?"

"Or another woman?" said Miss Liston.

"It comes to the same thing," said I. (About a volume and a half I
meant.)

"But it's more interesting. Do you think she'd better be a married
woman?" And Miss Liston looked at me inquiringly.

"The age prefers them married," I remarked.

This conversation happened on the second day of Miss Liston's visit,
and she lost no time in beginning to study her subjects. Pamela, she