had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about
for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank
cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the
spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the
wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugénie, and
again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople,
she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel
stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one
infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a
difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by
commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.
Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual
flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat,
round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was
held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet
train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face
was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung
aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its
cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

"My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really
been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had
over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew
her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite
suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly
twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon
movement as a very dangerous thing."

"Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned
Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty