had not escaped Isabel's charm, but there was "something," something a
little alarming about her,--a little like that wicked wall-paper.

Jenny divulged this criticism over supper when her mother was out of
ear-shot.

"How very clever of her!" exclaimed Isabel.

"She said the same of Dvorak's music," said Jenny.

"Good again," said Isabel. "How clever of her! Don't you feel how right
she is? We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is
like it. The New Spirit--that is, the devil--is in that wall-paper. A
psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and
Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper,
just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the
wall-papers of 1851. Am I not right?"

"If we could only paper New Zion like this!" exclaimed Theophil, a
curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman
thus expressing herself as an independent brain.

"Yes! New Zion! I'd quite forgotten all about New Zion. It seems
impossible to think of you together."

"And a little absurd, I suppose," said Theophil.

"It is uncouth material, I admit," he continued, "and yet somehow it
amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn't forget that we
had been given no other--but I don't suppose you can understand?"