happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers
and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton's first sight of the
genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the
hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in
befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her
out and watching her strong naive impressions of things. Stuart, I think,
was not quite happy. It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the
crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours' divorce from his
briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who
is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the
point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection.
The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain
little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished
dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal
interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except
in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than
sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies
and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women
wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take
their social exercises too much _au serieux._

'I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton
had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not
cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London
thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement,
never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her
fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract
sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless
store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as
harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago
but two subjects--Jamaica and the stage--the latter taken in a somewhat
narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number
of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her
mind and Mrs. Stuart's more frequently into contact with each other. But
I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this
kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Breth