cottage. His thoughts, as he climbed, were very full of Mrs. Sarratt.
But they were the thoughts of an artist--of a man who had studied
beauty, and the European tradition of beauty, whether in form or
landscape, for many years; who had worked--_a contre coeur_--in a Paris
studio, and had copied Tintoret--fervently--in Venice; who had been a
collector of most things, from Tanagra figures to Delia Robbias. She
made an impression upon him in her lightness and grace, her small
proportions, her lissomness of outline, very like that of a Tanagra
figure. How had she come to spring from Manchester? What kindred had she
with the smoke and grime of a great business city? He fell into amused
speculation. Manchester has always possessed colonies of Greek
merchants. Somewhere in the past was there some strain of southern blood
which might account for her? He remembered a beautiful Greek girl at an
Oxford Commemoration, when he had last attended that function; the
daughter of a Greek financier settled in London, whose still lovely
mother had been drawn and painted interminably by the Burne Jones and
William Morris group of artists. _She_ was on a larger scale than Mrs.
Sarratt, but the colour of the flesh was the same--as though light shone
through alabaster--and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes. Moreover she
had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of
nature, a creature of impulse and passion--passion, clinging and
self-devoted, not fierce and possessive--through all the more
superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little
creature is only at the beginning of her life'--he thought, with a kind
of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What the deuce will
she have made of it, by the end? Why should such beings grow old?'

His interest in her led him gradually to other thoughts--partly
disagreeable, partly philosophical. He had once--and only once--found
himself involved in a serious love-affair, which, as it had left him a
bachelor, had clearly come to no good. It was with a woman much older
than himself--gifted--more or less famous--a kind of modern Corinne whom
he had met for a month in Rome in his first youth. Corinne had laid
siege to him, and he had eagerly, whole-heartedly succumbed. He saw
himself, looking back, as the typically befooled and bamboozled mortal;
for Corinne, in the end, had thrown him over for a German professor, who
admired her books and had a villa on the