of thirty women to eleven men, in an absurd frock, and with a still more
absurd air of assured welcome. Poor little woman! Her comings and goings
from one Continental watering-place to another had been the progress of a
triumphant divinity; where she found an hotel she left a temple. I
sometimes think, too, that little look of expectant gladness may have
been due to the feeling that the Rectory was in England, and England was
home. She was dressed in the most perfect Parisian fashion, from the
crown of her fur toque to the tips of her little shoes; but she had never
learned to speak three words of French correctly. She informed everybody
of the fact that afternoon, laughing with the keenest enjoyment of her
remarkable stupidity; it seemed that her _rôle_ was to be remarkable in
everything. However that may have been, in less than half an hour seven
out of those eleven men were gathered round her chair in the corner; two
out of the seven were the rector and Sir Peter Morley, and Mrs. Nevill
Tyson was talking to all of them at once.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson--she was an illusion and a distraction from head to
foot; her beauty made a promise to the senses and broke it to the
intellect. Coil upon coil, and curl upon curl of dark hair, the dark eyes
of some ruminant animal, a little frivolous curve in an intelligent nose,
a lower jaw like a boy's, the full white throat of a woman, and the mouth
and cheeks of a child just waked from sleep. Tyson had escaped one
misfortune that had been prophesied for him. His wife was not vulgar. She
sat at her ease (much more at her ease than Miss Batchelor), and
chattered away about her honeymoon, her bad French, the places she had
been to, the people she had seen, and all without any consciousness of
her delightful self. Now it was a continuous stream of minute talk,
growing shallower and shallower as it spread over a larger surface; and
now her mind had hardly settled on its subject before it was off and away
again like a butterfly. There was one advantage in this excessive