had hatched a little romance according to which she was the daughter
of an artist, a painter or a sculptor, who had left the western
world when the century was fresh, to study in the ancient schools.
It was essential to my hypothesis that this amiable man should have
lost his wife, should have been poor and unsuccessful and should
have had a second daughter, of a disposition quite different
from Juliana's. It was also indispensable that he should have been
accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and should have established
himself there for the remainder of a struggling, saddened life.
There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau had had in her youth
a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous and fascinating character,
and that she had passed through some singular vicissitudes.
By what passions had she been ravaged, by what sufferings had
she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for
the monotonous future?

I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories
about her in my arbor and the bees droned in the flowers.
It was incontestable that, whether for right or for wrong,
most readers of certain of Aspern's poems (poems not as
ambiguous as the sonnets--scarcely more divine, I think--
of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had
not always adhered to the steep footway of renunciation.
There hovered about her name a perfume of reckless passion,
an intimation that she had not been exactly as the respectable
young person in general. Was this a sign that her singer had
betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to posterity?
Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one's finger
on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation.
Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration