common she was not common--not at least flagrantly so--and perhaps also
not excellent. At all events she wouldn't be, in appearance at least, a
dreary appendage; which in the case of a person "hooking on" was always
something gained. Was it because something of a romantic or pathetic
interest usually attaches to a good creature who has been the victim of a
"long engagement" that this young lady made an impression on me from the
first--favoured as I had been so quickly with this glimpse of her
history? I could charge her certainly with no positive appeal; she only
held her tongue and smiled, and her smile corrected whatever suggestion
might have forced itself upon me that the spirit within her was dead--the
spirit of that promise of which she found herself doomed to carry out the
letter.

What corrected it less, I must add, was an odd recollection which
gathered vividness as I listened to it--a mental association evoked by
the name of Mr. Porterfield. Surely I had a personal impression, over-
smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at Liverpool, or
who presently would be, for Mrs. Nettlepoint's protegee. I had met him,
known him, some time, somewhere, somehow, on the other side. Wasn't he
studying something, very hard, somewhere--probably in Paris--ten years
before, and didn't he make extraordinarily neat drawings, linear and
architectural? Didn't he go to a table d'hote, at two francs
twenty-five, in the Rue Bonaparte, which I then frequented, and didn't he
wear spectacles and a Scotch plaid arranged in a manner which seemed to
say "I've trustworthy information that that's the way they do it in the
Highlands"? Wasn't he exemplary to positive irritation, and very poor,
poor to positive oppression, so that I supposed he had no overcoat and
his tartan would be what he slept under at night? Wasn't he working very
hard still, and wouldn't he be, in the natural course, not yet satisfied
that he had found his feet or knew enough to launch out? He would be a