f course I do!"

"And do you think beauty is everything?"

"I don't know about its being everything. But it's very delightful"

"Of course it is difficult for a woman to know how far to go," said
my companion. "I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I am
intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back--don't you see
what I mean?--I don't quite see where I shall be landed. I only want
to be quiet, after all," Miss Ambient continued, in a tone of stifled
yearning which seemed to indicate that she had not yet arrived at her
desire. "And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?" she inquired,
with a cadence apparently intended for an assurance that my answer would
settle this recondite question for her. It was difficult for me to
make it very original, and I am afraid I repaid her confidence with an
unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, appending to it an inquiry,
equally destitute of freshness, and still more wanting perhaps in tact,
as to whether she did not mean to go to church, as that was an obvious
way of being good. She replied that she had performed this duty in the
morning, and that for her, on Sunday afternoon, supreme virtue consisted
in answering the week's letters. Then suddenly, without transition, she
said to me, "It's quite a mistake about Dolcino being better. I have seen
him, and he's not at all right."

"Surely his mother would know, would n't she?" I suggested.

She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great
beeches. "As regards most matters, one can easily say what, in a given
situation, my sister-in-law would do. But as regards this one, there are
strange elements at work."

"Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?"

"No, I mean in my sister-in-law's feelings."

"Elements of affection, of course; elements of anxiety. Why do you call
them strange?"

She repeated my words. "Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She
is very anxious."

Miss Ambient made me vaguely uneasy; she almost frightened me, and I
wished she would go and write her letters. "His father will have seen
him now," I said, "and if he is not satisfied he will send for the
doctor."

"The doctor ought to have been here this morning. He lives only two
miles away."

I reflected that all this was very possibly only a part of the general
tragedy of Miss Ambient's view of things; but I asked her why she had
n't urged such a necessity upon her sister-in-l