under the said circumstances and
environment inevitably culminate in the same silver-haired,
pink-cheeked, grandchildren-adoring old lady, who sees the regulation
ending in England of the _brilliant_ girl, just as she sees the end of
the girl whose brain registers the fact that the seaside is a place to
be visited only in August; whose originality finds vent in the
different coloured ribbons with which she adorns her dogs and her
lingerie; whose passions--oh well! who bothers about the little placid
stream flowing without a ripple between the mud flats of that drear
country habit?

No doubt about it, if money troubles had not given her the opportunity
for which she had always craved, Jill _would_ have finally
metamorphosed her brilliant self into that dear old dame who is as
beloved and ubiquitous and uniform as the penny bun. But seeing her
chance she had clutched at it with eager out-stretched hands, and in
all these months she had not had one single regret, or one moment of
longing for peaceful, grey-tinted England, or the friends with whom she
had visited and hunted and done the hundred and one trivial things
wealthy beautiful girls are accustomed to do in England, and who in her
case had continued their social career without breaking their hearts or
engagements on account of the monetary _debacle_ of their one time
companion. Her instinct had not failed her in regard to the man who,
without consulting her in any way, was even at that hour starting forth
to arrange their marriage, and she troubled not her head with the
thought of what _might_ have happened to her _if_ her instinct had
failed her, though the chances are that rather than have even the outer
petals of her womanhood bruised by the closing of a trap into which she
might have placed her feet, she would have sent the vessel of her soul
afloat down the great wide river ending in the ocean of eternity.

She was that most interesting and most rare cross-bred result of the
elusive something, be it soul, imagination, or ecstasy which had turned
a woman ancestress, created for the great honour of bearing children,
into the nun, whose maternal instincts had feigned find solace in the
marble or plaster child-image, and even that out of reach of those
hands which should have trembled over swaddling clothes; and that
passion for love and light which had driven the dancing wayward feet of
a Belle Marquise ancestress from love to love, until they had come to a
sta