Stormer came back from a protracted residence abroad that Ethel
(which was this young lady's name) began to produce the effect, which
was afterwards remarkable in her, of a certain kind of high
resolution. She made one apprehend that she meant to do something
for herself. She was long-necked and near-sighted and striking, and
I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in a form so hard and high
and dry. She was cold and affected and ambitious, and she carried an
eyeglass with a long handle, which she put up whenever she wanted not
to see. She had come out, as the phrase is, immensely; and yet I
felt as if she were surrounded with a spiked iron railing. What she
meant to do for herself was to marry, and it was the only thing, I
think, that she meant to do for any one else; yet who would be
inspired to clamber over that bristling barrier? What flower of
tenderness or of intimacy would such an adventurer conceive as his
reward?

This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally never
confided to me the secret. He was a joyless, jokeless young man,
with the air of having other secrets as well, and a determination to
get on politically that was indicated by his never having been known
to commit himself--as regards any proposition whatever--beyond an
exclamatory "Oh!" His wife and he must have conversed mainly in prim
ejaculations, but they understood sufficiently that they were kindred
spirits. I remember being angry with Greville Fane when she
announced these nuptials to me as magnificent; I remember asking her
what splendour there was in the union of the daughter of a woman of
genius with an irredeemable mediocrity. "Oh! he's awfully clever,"
she said; but she blushed for the maternal fib. What she meant was
that though Sir Baldwin's estates were not vast (he had a dreary
house in South Kensington and a still drearier "Hall" somewhere in