. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the
American depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of
my dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanour--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
written to me from Florence after my mother's death and had mentioned
in a postscript that in our young lady's calculations the lowest numbers
were now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and if in subsequent
letters there was no news of a sequel I was content to accept small
things and to believe that grave tidings, should there be any, would
come to me in due course. The gravity of what might happen to a
featherweight became indeed with time and distance less appreciable,
and I was not without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of
proportion was not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the
world with the ups and downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky
and dim, a small fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable
consciousness of how kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was
professionally more preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms
of pretty faces in my eyes and a chorus of high voices in my ears.
Geoffrey Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three
letters: his last information had been that he was going into the
figures of rural illiteracy. I was delighted to receive it and had no
doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are said to
be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice was sound and
that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on my part another hope,
a hope suggested by some roundabout rumour--I forget how it reached
me--that he was engaged to a girl down in Hampshire. He turned out not
to be, but I felt sure that if only he went into figures deep enough
he would become, among the girls down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of
those numerous prizes of battle whose defences are practically not on
the scale of their provocations. I nursed in short the thought that it
was probably open to him to become one of the types as to which, as the
years go on, frivolous and superficial spectators lose themselves in the
wonder that they ever succeeded in winning even the least winsome mates.
He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about
her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum's, an element of instinctive tact, a brief
implication that if you didn't happen to