to judge whether she does seem so! She has every gift, and culture has
done everything for each. What goes on in her mind I of course can't
say; what reaches the observer--the admirer--is simply a sort of fragrant
emanation of intelligence and sympathy."

"Madame Blumenthal," I said, smiling, "might be the loveliest woman in
the world, and you the object of her choicest favours, and yet what I
should most envy you would be, not your peerless friend, but your
beautiful imagination."

"That's a polite way of calling me a fool," said Pickering. "You are a
sceptic, a cynic, a satirist! I hope I shall be a long time coming to
that."

"You will make the journey fast if you travel by express trains. But
pray tell me, have you ventured to intimate to Madame Blumenthal your
high opinion of her?"

"I don't know what I may have said. She listens even better than she
talks, and I think it possible I may have made her listen to a great deal
of nonsense. For after the first few words I exchanged with her I was
conscious of an extraordinary evaporation of all my old diffidence. I
have, in truth, I suppose," he added in a moment, "owing to my peculiar
circumstances, a great accumulated fund of unuttered things of all sorts
to get rid of. Last evening, sitting there before that charming woman,
they came swarming to my lips. Very likely I poured them all out. I
have a sense of having enshrouded myself in a sort of mist of talk, and
of seeing her lovely eyes shining through it opposite to me, like fog-
lamps at sea." And here, if I remember rightly, Pickering broke off into
an ardent parenthesis, and declared that Madame Blumenthal's eyes had