nearly three-quarters of a
century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by Aspern on the
occasion of his own second absence from America--verses of which Cumnor
and I had after infinite conjecture established solidly enough the
date--that she was even then, as a girl of twenty, on the foreign side
of the sea. There was an implication in the poem (I hope not just for
the phrase) that he had come back for her sake. We had no real light
upon her circumstances at that moment, any more than we had upon her
origin, which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest.
Cumnor had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in
which the poet visited and that, in consequence of her position, there
was from the first something unavowed, or rather something positively
clandestine, in their relations. I on the other hand had hatched a
little romance according to which she was the daughter of an artist, a
painter or a sculptor, who had left the western world when the century
was fresh, to study in the ancient schools. It was essential to my
hypothesis that this amiable man should have lost his wife, should have
been poor and unsuccessful and should have had a second daughter, of a
disposition quite different from Juliana's. It was also indispensable
that he should have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and
should have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling,
saddened life. There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau
had had in her youth a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous and
fascinating character, and that she had passed through some singular
vicissitudes. By what passions had she been ravaged, by what sufferings
had she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for the
monotonous future?

I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my
arbor and the bees droned in the flowers. It was incontestable that,
whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of Aspern's
poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets--scarcely more divine, I
think--of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had not always
adhered to the steep footway of renunciation. There hovered about her
name a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been
exactly as the respectable young person in general. Was this a sign that
her singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to
posterity? Certain it