--Pauline. I can't tell you how much I like her. I--it sounds
extravagant, but it's true--I can think of no other woman in
the whole of fiction whom I like so well--who makes so
curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her waywardness
--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as
any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of
the women I know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she
breathes. Yet I have never known a woman resembling her. Life
would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling
her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be.
Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or is
Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of
imagination?"

"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my
friend's inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix
Wildmay is a perfectly commonplace Englishman. How could a
woman like Pauline be the creature of his imagination? No--she
was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay was a mere copyist.
He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a woman
who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
story."

The Duchessa's eyes were intent.

"The story-? Tell me the story," she pronounced in a breath,
with imperious eagerness.

And her eyes waited, intently.