he impression passed somehow when she
was out of sight) occupied you so completely. I can best describe the
attention she provoked by saying that she struck you above all things
as a felicitous FINAL product--after the fashion of some plant or some
fruit, some waxen orchid or some perfect peach. She was clearly the
result of a process of calculation, a process patiently educative, a
pressure exerted, and all artfully, so that she should reach a high
point.

This high point had been the star of her mother's heaven--it hung
before her so unquenchably--and had shed the only light (in default of a
better) that was to shine on the poor lady's path. It stood her instead
of every other ideal. The very most and the very best--that was what the
girl had been led on to achieve; I mean of course, since no real miracle
had been wrought, the most and the best she was capable of. She was as
pretty, as graceful, as intelligent, as well-bred, as well-informed,
as well-dressed, as could have been conceived for her; her music, her
singing, her German, her French, her English, her step, her tone, her
glance, her manner, everything in her person and movement, from the
shade and twist of her hair to the way you saw her finger-nails were
pink when she raised her hand, had been carried so far that one found
one's self accepting them as the very measure of young grace. I regarded
her thus as a model, yet it was a part of her perfection that she had
none of the stiffness of a pattern. If she held the observation it was
because you wondered where and when she would break down; but she never
broke down, either in her French accent or in her role of educated
angel.

After Archie had come the ladies were manifestly his greatest resource,
and all the world knows why a party of four is more convenient than a
party of three. My nephew had kept me waiting a week, with a serenity
all his own; but this very coolness was a help to harmony--so long, that
is, as I didn't lose my temper with it. I didn't, for the most part,
because my young man's unperturbed acceptance of the most various forms
of good fortune had more than anything else the effect of amusing me. I
had seen little of him for the last three or four years; I wondered what
his impending majority would have made of him--he didn't at all carry
himself as if the wind of his fortune were rising--and I watched
him with a solicitude that usually ended in a joke. He was a tall
fresh-coloured youth,