en a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton.
You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and constitution relaxed
by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional
degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of
such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh
English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art,
vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a
sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health--there
are some signs of it--what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in
it. I long to step in, to "have at" somebody, to stop it.

'A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved
on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The
afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the
pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed
branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with
yellow irises. The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us
out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in
which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the
scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of
whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a
discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing. Are Eugene de
Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere
incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At
last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in
Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is
stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the
talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of
course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.
We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers
diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning
back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a
gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch
overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray
plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large
disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little
dis