up, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition. My hope for the
girl's future had slipped ignominiously off his back, but after his
purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith. The girl's
own faith was wonderful. It couldn't however be contagious: too great
was the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her colours
were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a person
speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was after all
vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and could
almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly tired of
its "purity," which affected me at last as inane. One moved with her,
moreover, among phenomena mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talk
ever matched anything out of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for her,
but his family was leading him a life. His mother, horrid woman, had
told some one that she would rather he should be swallowed by a tiger
than marry a girl not absolutely one of themselves. He had given his
young friend unmistakable signs, but was lying low, gaining time: it was
in his father's power to be, both in personal and in pecuniary ways,
excessively nasty to him. His father wouldn't last for ever--quite the
contrary; and he knew how thoroughly, in spite of her youth, her beauty
and the swarm of her admirers, some of them positively threatening in
their passion, he could trust her to hold out. There were richer,
cleverer men, there were greater personages too, but she liked her
"little viscount" just as he was, and liked to think that, bullied and
persecuted, he had her there so gratefully to rest upon. She came back
to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn't. I never met
my pretty model in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exalted
circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the
grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she
had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, the disclosure of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house d