circles. She had
decided in her own mind that French art meant a tainted art, and she had
shown herself very restive--Kendal had seen something of it on their
Surrey expedition--under any attempts to make her share the interest
which certain sections of the English cultivated public feel in foreign
thought, and especially in the foreign theatre. Kendal took particular
pains, when they glided off from the topic of his sister to more general
matters, to make her realise some of the finer aspects of the French
world of which she knew so little, and which she judged so harshly; the
laborious technical training to which the dwellers on the other side of
the channel submit themselves so much more readily than the English in
any matter of art; the intellectual conscientiousness and refinement due
to the pressure of an organised and continuous tradition, and so on. He
realised that a good deal of what he said or suggested must naturally be
lost upon her. But it was delightful to feel her mind yielding to his,
while it stimulated her sympathy and perhaps roused her surprise to find
in him every now and then a grave and unpretending response to those
moral enthusiasms in herself which were too real and deep for much direct
expression.

'Whenever I am next in Paris, she said to him, when she perforce rose to
go, with that pretty hesitation of manner which was so attractive in her,
'would you mind--would Madame de Chateauvieux,--if I asked you to
introduce me to your sister? It would be a great pleasure to me.'

Kendal made a very cordial reply, and they parted knowing more of each
other than they had yet done. Not that his leading impression of her was
in any way modified. Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful
as a woman,--had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction
of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience;
but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of
incompetence? After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been
too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them. Kendal was
far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character
of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own
person. Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates
distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding
them. It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head