statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly,
very intellectual. She had four new manias every year; her last
winter's one had been that bottle-and-squirt mania, miscalled
chemistry; her spring madness was for the Greek drama. She had
devoured Schlegel's lectures, and thought them divine; and now she
was hard at work on Sophocles, with a little help from translations,
and thought she understood him every word. Then she was somewhat
High-Church in her notions, and used to go up every Wednesday and
Friday to the chapel in the hills, where Lancelot had met her, for
an hour's mystic devotion, set off by a little graceful asceticism.
As for Lancelot, she never thought of him but as an empty-headed
fox-hunter who had met with his deserts; and the brilliant accounts
which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot's
physical well doing and agreeable conversation only made her set him
down the sooner as a twin clever-do-nothing to the despised
Bracebridge, whom she hated for keeping her father in a roar of
laughter.

But her sister, little Honoria, had all the while been busy messing
and cooking with her own hands for the invalid; and almost fell in
love with the colonel for his watchful kindness. And here a word
about Honoria, to whom Nature, according to her wont with sisters,
had given almost everything which Argemone wanted, and denied almost
everything which Argemone had, except beauty. And even in that, the
many-sided mother had made her a perfect contrast to her sister,--
tiny and luscious, dark-eyed and dark-haired; as full of wild simple
passion as an Italian, thinking little, except where she felt much--
which was, indeed, everywhere; for she lived in a perpetual April-
shower of exaggerated sympathy for all suffering, whether in novels
or in life; and daily gave the lie to that shallow old calumny, that