comment by a writer who seemed to touch nearly
upon the heart of the secret. The paragraph runs thus:

"Once a man told me that Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson was the one woman
in the world he could imagine a man being willing to die for. Every
man I asked--every single man, rich and poor, young or old, clever or
stupid--all agreed about Mrs. Stevenson, that she was the most
fascinating woman he had ever seen. It was some years ago that I saw
her, but I would know her again if I saw her between flashes of
lightning in a stormy sea. Individuality--that was her charm. She
knew it and she had sense enough to be herself. Individuality and
simple unaffected honesty of speech and action and look are the most
potent charms and the most lasting that any woman can ever hope to
have."

Her broad sympathies, too, had much to do with it. If there is any
word in the English language that means the opposite of snob, it may
certainly be applied to her. She picked out her friends for the simple
and sufficient reason that she liked them, and they might and did
include a duchess, a Chinese, a great English playwright, a French
fisherman, a saloon-keeper who was once shipwrecked with her, a noted
actor--and so on through a long and varied list. Once in Sydney when
she was out walking with her daughter, both richly dressed, she
stopped suddenly to shake hands with a group of black-avised pirates
(to all appearances) with rings in their ears. She had met them
somewhere among the islands, and her little white-gloved hand grasped
their big brown ones with genuine and affectionate friendship. Wide
apart as she and her husband were in many things, in their utter lack
of snobbery they were as one. Once they were at a French
watering-place when from their room upstairs they heard a loud uproar
below. A voice cried: "I will see my Louis!" Going out to see what the
trouble was, Louis found four French fishermen in a _char-a-bancs_--all
in peasant blouses. The major-domo of the fashionable hotel was trying
to keep them out, but when Louis appeared he called out their names
joyfully, and they all cried: "Mon cher Louis!" After each had
embraced him, he asked them up to his rooms, and, despite the
ill-concealed scorn of the waiter, ordered up a grand dinner for them.
They were the French fishermen he had known at Monterey, California,
and one may be sure that they met with as cordial a welcome from his
wife as from himself. I know that in one of her l