'would you mind--would Madame de Châteauvieux,--if I asked you to
introduce me to your sister? It would be a great pleasure to me.'

Kendal made a very cordial reply, and they parted knowing more of each
other than they had yet done. Not that his leading impression of her was
in any way modified. Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful
as a woman,--had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction
of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience;
but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of
incompetence? After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been
too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them. Kendal was
far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character
of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own
person. Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates
distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding
them. It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head
perfectly cool on the subject of Miss Bretherton's artistic claims, but
he was conscious that it was not always very easy to do--a consciousness
that made him sometimes all the more recalcitrant under the pressure of
her celebrity.

For it seemed to him that in society he heard of nothing but her--her
beauty, her fascination, and her success. At every dinner-table he heard
stories of her, some of them evident inventions, but all tending in the
same direction--that is to say, illustrating either the girl's proud
independence and her determination to be patronised by nobody, not even
by royalty itself, or her lavish kind-heartedness and generosity towards
the poor and the inferiors of her own profession. She was for the moment
the great interest of London, and people talked of her popularity and
social prestige as a sign of the times and a proof of the changed