by their consumption. His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some
of them had the good fortune to be carried out by a person of perfect
delicacy. Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but
he never found this out. She attenuated him without his knowing it,
for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandised HER. Without
her he really would have been bigger still, and society, breathing
more freely, was practically under an obligation to her which, to do
it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of mystified respect. She
felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and her leisure into the
things of the soul--the most beautiful things she knew. She found
them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred places, and
particularly in a dim and sacred region--the region of active pity--
over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it
would have been an impertinence to lift them. But she cultivated
other beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of
something fine the moments at which it most seemed to her to come
true were when she saw beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of
art. She loved the perfect work--she had the artistic chord. This
chord could vibrate only to the touch of another, so that
appreciation, in her spirit, had the added intensity of regret. She
could understand the joy of creation, and she thought it scarcely
enough to be told that she herself created happiness. She would have
liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just here that her
liberty failed her. She had not the voice--she had only the vision.
The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as she
said, could do something.

As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was
admirably hospitable to such people as a class. She believed Allan
Wayworth could do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the