let eyes, and golden-brown hair. Her features
were distinguished by that perfect chiselling which gave such a haughty
grace to her grandmother's countenance, even at sixty-seven years of
age--a loveliness which, like the sculptured marble it resembles, is
unalterable by time. Lesbia was reading Keats. It was her habit to read
the poets, carefully and deliberately, taking up one at a time, and duly
laying a volume aside when she found herself mistress of its contents.
She had no passion for poetry, but it was an elegant leisurely kind of
reading which suited her languid temperament. Moreover, her grandmother
had told her that an easy familiarity with the great poets is of all
knowledge that which best qualifies a woman to shine in conversation,
without offending the superior sex by any assumption of scholarship.

Mary was a very different class of reader; capricious, omniverous,
tearing out the hearts of books, roaming from flower to flower in the
fields of literature, loving old and new, romance and reality, novels,
travels, plays, poetry, and never dwelling long on any one theme.
Perhaps if Mary had lived in the bosom of a particularly sympathetic
family she might have been reckoned almost a genius, so much of poetry
and originality was there in her free unconventional character; but
hitherto it had been Mary's mission in life to be snubbed, whereby she
had acquired a very poor opinion of her own talents.

'Oh,' she cried with a desperate yawn, while Lesbia smiled her languid
smile over Endymion, 'how I wished something would happen--anything to
stir us out of this statuesque, sleeping-beauty state of being. I verily
believe the spiders are all asleep in the ivy, and the mice behind the
wainscot, and the horses in the stable.'

'What could happen?' asked Lesbia, with a gentle elevation of pencilled
brows. 'Are not these lovely lines--

"And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach,
Or ripe October's faded marigolds,
Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds."

Faded marigolds! Is not that intensely sweet?'

'Very well for your sleepy Keats, but I don't suppose you would have
noticed the passage if marigolds were not in fashion,' said Mary, with a
touch of scorn. 'What could happen? Why a hundred things--an earthquake,
flood, or fire. What could happen, do you say, Lesbia? Why Maulevrier
might come home unexpectedly, and charm us out of this death-in-life.'

'He would occasion a good deal of unpleasantness