e and hedge, as she drove, came ever changing
glimpses of gleaming palace fronts; glimpses that made her turn and look
again; that stimulated but did not satisfy, and left a pleasant longing
for something on the seeming verge of fulfilment.

The very stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces
suggested the enchanter's wand. To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns
where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the
rock-bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and screaming
gulls circle where now the swallows hovered about the steep blue roof of
a French chateau. Hundreds of years hence, would these great pleasure
houses still be standing behind their screens and walls and hedges? or
would, indeed, the shattered, vine-covered marble of a balustrade alone
mark the crumbling terraces whence once the fabled owners scanned the
sparkling waters of the ocean? Who could say?

The onward rush of our story between its canon walls compels us
reluctantly to skip the narrative of the winter conquests of the lady who
is our heroine. Popularity had not spoiled her, and the best proof of
this lay in the comments of a world that is nothing if not critical. No
beauty could have received with more modesty the triumph which had
greeted her at Mrs. Grenfell's tableaux, in April, when she had appeared
as Circe, in an architectural frame especially designed by Mr. Farwell
himself. There had been a moment of hushed astonishment, followed by an
acclaim that sent the curtain up twice again.

We must try to imagine, too, the logical continuation of that triumph in
the Baiae of our modern republic and empire, Newport. Open, Sesame!
seems, as ever, to be the countersign of her life. Even the palace gates
swung wide to her: most of them with the more readiness because she had
already passed through other gates--Mrs. Grainger's, for instance. Baiae,
apparently, is a topsy-turvy world in which, if one alights upside down,
it is difficult to become righted. To alight upside down, is to alight in
a palace. The Graingers did not live in one, but in a garden that existed
before the palaces were, and one that the palace owners could not copy: a
garden that three generations of Graingers, somewhat assisted by a
remarkable climate, had made with loving care. The box was priceless, the
spreading trees in the miniature park no less so, and time, the
unbribeable, alone could now have produced the wide, carefully cheris