if she had tripped out of a Japanese fan,
and slept at night in a pot-pourri jar. And she had brains, those good
things--brains.

Her name was very like her life, one-half of which might be described as
Myrtilla, the other half as Williamson. She was Myrtilla during the day,
dabbling with her water-colours, her flowers, or her books; but at six
o'clock each afternoon, with the sound of aggressive masculine boots in
the hall, her life suddenly changed with a sigh to Williamson. The
Williamson half of her life was so clumsily, so grotesquely ill-matched
with the Myrtilla half that it was, and probably will always remain, a
mystery why she had ever attempted so tasteless and inconvenient an
addition,--a mystery, however, far from unique in the history of those
mysteriously stupid unhappy marriages with evident boors which refined
and charming women will, it is to be feared, go on making to the end of
the human chapter.

It was perhaps a day hardly less interesting for Myrtilla than for the
young people themselves when she had first met Henry and Esther
Mesurier. Before, in the dull bourgeois society into which Williamson
had transplanted her from London, she had found none with whom she dared
be her natural Myrtilla. There she was expected to be Williamson to the
bone. Henry and Esther, however, were only too grateful for Myrtilla,
through whom was to come to them the revelation of some minor graces of
life for which they had the instincts, but on which they had lacked
instruction; and who, still more important, at least for Henry, was to
be their first fragile link with certain strenuous new northern writers,
translations of whom in every tongue had just then descended, Gothlike,
upon Europe, to the great energising of its various literatures. She it
was too who first handed them the fretted golden key to the enchanted
garden of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the striking head of the young Dante
in sepia, which had hung in a sort of shrine-recess in Henry's study,
had been copied for him from Rossetti's sketch by Myrtilla's own hand.

She had, too, one of the most precious gifts for friendship, the gift of
unselfish and diligent and progressive appreciation of all a friend's
good points. She never flattered; but she never missed the smallest
opportunity for praise. She was one of those rare people who make you
feel happy in yourself, who send you away somehow dignified, profitably
raised in your own esteem; just as others ha