manner in which you throw it back on the left shoulder. What is your
name?"

Lamartine, who had already won distinction as a poet, told her.

"I had never heard it," she exclaimed, with a convincing accent of
sincerity; "but, poet or not, I like you, and have hope for you."

"Go," she added; "dinner is served. Dine quickly, and return soon. I go
to meditate upon you, and to see more clearly into the confusion of my
ideas respecting your person and your future."

* * * * *

Lamartine had scarcely concluded his dinner when Lady Hester sent for
him. He found her smoking a long Oriental pipe, the fellow of which she
ordered to be brought for his own use. Accustomed to see the most
graceful women of the East with their tchibouques, he was neither
surprised nor shocked by the gracious, _nonchalant_ attitude, or the
light wreaths of perfumed smoke issuing from Lady Hester's finely curved
lips, interrupting the conversation without chilling it. They conversed
together for a long time upon the favourite subject--the unique,
mysterious theme of that extraordinary woman, or the modern Circe of the
Desert, who so completely recalled to mind the famous female magicians
of antiquity. The religious opinions of Lady Hester seemed to her guest
a skilful though confused mixture of the various creeds among which she
was condemned--or had condemned herself--to live.

"Mystical as the Druses, with whose mysterious secrets she alone,
perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and
as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the
Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she
practised--she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and
supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East,
and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists. A
strange and yet sublime medley, which it is much easier to stigmatize as
lunatic than to analyze and comprehend. But Lady Hester Stanhope was no
lunatic. Madness, which reveals itself only too clearly in the victim's
eyes, was not to be detected in her frank, direct look--madness, which
invariably betrays itself in conversation, which it involuntarily
interrupts by sudden, irregular, and eccentric outbreaks, was nowhere
discernible in Lady Hester's exalted, mystical, and cloudy, but
sustained, connected and vigorous monologues.

"If," adds M. de Lamartine, "I were to off