relation to the encounter from which she remained excluded? The lady who
had left her standing rejoined her and they drifted off together into
the vast of the unfathomed, but not, I like to believe, the
unfathomable.

When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course it did not
break. That would have been a violence of which English weather would
not have been capable. There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a
trap were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It softly gave way
in a gradual, delicious coolness, which again mellowed at the edges, as
it were, and dissolved in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain
might finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the "anguish
of the solstice," as we had felt it in London, and by the time the first
shower insinuated itself we were in the heart of the Malvern Hills.

Of course, this heated term was not as the heated terms of New York are;
but it excelled them in length, if not in breadth and thickness. The
nights were always cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights do
not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would have been
unendurable, but in London one woke each morning with renewed hope and
renewed strength. Very likely there were parts of London where people
despaired and weakened through the night, but in these polite
perspectives I am trying to exclude such places; and whenever I say
"one" in this relation, I am imagining one of the many Americans who
witness the London season perhaps oftener from the outside than the
inside, but who still can appreciate and revere its facts.

The season was said to begin very late, and it was said to be a very
"bad" season, throughout May, when the charges of those who live by it
ordinarily feel an expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become