No, we didn't remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much
as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand. She
was prayerful. She was terrible. Her one-idead peasant mind was
as inaccessible as a closed iron safe. She was fatal. . . It's
perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now;
but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don't mind
appearing ridiculous. I suppose fatality must be expressed,
embodied, like other forces of this earth; and if so why not in
such people as well as in other more glorious or more frightful
figures?

We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt's half-hidden
acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the
man Allegre and the girl Rita. Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills
with that story, passed on to what he called the second act, the
disclosure, with, what he called, the characteristic Allegre
impudence--which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires, or
tramps, by many degrees--the revelation of Rita's existence to the
world at large. It wasn't a very large world, but then it was most
choicely composed. How is one to describe it shortly? In a
sentence it was the world that rides in the morning in the Bois.

In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her
sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of
his wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent
creatures of the air, he had given her amongst other
accomplishments the art of sitting admirably on a horse, and
directly they returned to Paris he took her out with him for their
first morning ride.