and age, upon ground so equal that heart touches heart, cannot say that I
understand the English character to anything like the extent to which I
fancy I understand the Italian and the French. Between us of the
Continent and them of the island the British Channel always flows. There
is an Englishman here to whom I have been introduced, whom I have met,
though but seldom, in that society which bounds the Paris world to me.
Pray, pray tell me, did you ever know, ever meet him? His name is Graham
Vane. He is the only son, I am told, of a man who was a _celebrite_ in
England as an orator and statesman, and on both sides he belongs to the
haute aristocratic. He himself has that indescribable air and mien to
which we apply the epithet 'distinguished.' In the most crowded salon
the eye would fix on him, and involuntarily follow his movements. Yet
his manners are frank and simple, wholly without the stiffness or reserve
which are said to characterize the English. There is an inborn dignity
in his bearing which consists in the absence of all dignity assumed. But
what strikes me most in this Englishman is an expression of countenance
which the English depict by the word 'open,'--that expression which
inspires you with a belief in the existence of sincerity. Mrs. Morley
said of him, in that poetic extravagance of phrase by which the Americans
startle the English, "That man's forehead would light up the Mammoth
Cave." Do you not know, Eulalie, what it is to us cultivators of art--
art being the expression of truth through fiction--to come into the
atmosphere of one of those souls in which Truth stands out bold and
beautiful in itself, and needs no idealization through fiction? Oh, how
near we should be to heaven could we live daily, hourly, in the presence
of one the honesty of whose word we could never doubt, the authority of
whose word we could never disobey! Mr. Vane professes not to understand
music, not even to care for it, except rarely, and yet he spoke of its
influence over others with an enthusiasm that half charmed me once more
back to my destined calling; nay, might have charmed me wholly, but that