Lizzie Flower was a wallflower. That is to say, she had early in life rid
herself of the admiration of the many, by refusing to supply an unlimited
amount of small talk. In feature she was as plain as George Eliot. A boy
is plastic, and even a modest wallflower can woo him; but a man, for her,
inspires awe--with him she takes no liberties. And the wallflower woos the
youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using her influence the
better to instruct him.

It is fortunate for a boy escaping adolescence to be educated and loved
(the words are synonymous) by a good woman. Indeed, the youngster who has
not violently loved a woman old enough to be his mother has dropped
something out of his life that he will have to go back and pick up in
another incarnation.

I said Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate; and she declared that he was
the brightest and most receptive pupil she had ever had.

He was seventeen--she was twenty-six. They read Shelley, Keats and Byron
aloud, and together passed through the "Byronic Period." They became
violently atheistic, and at the same time decidedly religious: things that
seem paradoxical, but are not. They adopted a vegetable diet and for two
years they eschewed meat. They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the
groves were God's first temples; and sitting at the gnarled roots of some
great oak, they would read aloud, by turn, from "Queen Mab."

On one such excursion out across Hampstead Heath they lost their copy of
"Shelley" in the leaves, and a wit has told us that it sprouted, and as a
result--the flower and fruit--we have Browning's poem of "Pauline." And
this must be so, for Robert and Miss Flower (he always called her "Miss
Flower," but she called him "Robert") made many an excursion, in search of