annoyed him, in private life had its particular attractiveness. And, with
regard to this special subject, he was conscious of breaking down a
prejudice; he felt the pleasure of conquering a great reluctance in her.
Evidently on starting in London she had set herself against everything
that she identified with the great Trench actress who had absorbed the
theatre-going public during the previous season; not from personal
jealousy, as Kendal became ultimately convinced, but from a sense of keen
moral revolt against Madame Desforêts's notorious position and the
stories of her private life which were current in all circles. She had
decided in her own mind that French art meant a tainted art, and she had
shown herself very restive--Kendal had seen something of it on their
Surrey expedition--under any attempts to make her share the interest
which certain sections of the English cultivated public feel in foreign
thought, and especially in the foreign theatre. Kendal took particular
pains, when they glided off from the topic of his sister to more general
matters, to make her realise some of the finer aspects of the French
world of which she knew so little, and which she judged so harshly; the
laborious technical training to which the dwellers on the other side of
the channel submit themselves so much more readily than the English in
any matter of art; the intellectual conscientiousness and refinement due
to the pressure of an organised and continuous tradition, and so on. He
realised that a good deal of what he said or suggested must naturally be
lost upon her. But it was delightful to feel her mind yielding to his,
while it stimulated her sympathy and perhaps roused her surprise to find
in him every now and then a grave and unpretending response to those
moral enthusiasms in herself which were too real and deep for much direct
expression.

'Whenever I am next in Paris, she said to him, when she perforce rose to
go, with that pretty hesitation of manner which was so attractive in her,