to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn't. I never met
my pretty model in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exalted
circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the
grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she
had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, the disclosure of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze
their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through
the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one
of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had run
after him. Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wished
very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition
which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn't in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn't have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she
could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in the French capital, many accidents might have happened.