s it was no mission of mine to bring about. If they were to
occur they might occur by a logic of their own.

Let me say at once that they did occur and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less
adequate than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly
for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the tabernacle of her
face. This prodigy was frankly there the sole object of interest; in
other places there were occasionally other objects. The freedom of her
manners continued to be stupefying; there was nothing so extraordinary
save the absence in connection with it of any catastrophe. She was kept
innocent by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put
off her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law
unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone
orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond
Synges gave relief to this character, and she paid them handsomely to
be, as every one said, shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot
tigers, but he returned in time for the private view: it was he who had
snapped up, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition.

My hope for the girl's future had slipped ignominiously off his back,
but after his purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith.
The girl's own faith was wonderful. It couldn't however be contagious:
too great was the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her
colours were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a
person speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was
after all vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and
could almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly
tired of her perfection. There grew to be something silly in its eternal
smoothness. One moved with her moreover among phenomena mismated and
unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched with anything out of it.
Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading him a
life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she would rather
he should be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not absolutely one
of themselves. He had given his young friend unmistakable signs, but he
was lying low, gaining time: it was in his father's power to be, both
in personal an