Assingham professed, was exactly what would endear them to her, and that, in turn, drew from her visitor a fresh declaration of al the comfort of his being able so to depend on her. He had been with her, at this point, some twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits, and he stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciation. He stayed moreover--THAT was real y the sign of the hour--in spite of the nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth much rather fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently meant to soothe it. She had not soothed him, and there arrived, remarkably, a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out. He had not frightened her, as she cal ed it--he felt that; yet she was herself not at ease. She had been nervous, though trying to disguise it; the sight of him, fol owing on the announcement of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This conviction, for the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the effect, too, of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in cal ing, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow IMPORTANT--that was what it was--that there should be at this hour something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in al their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know, of a truth, that there was something the matter with HIM; since strangely, with so little to go upon--his heart had positively begun to beat to the tune of suspense. It fairly befel at last, for a climax, that they almost ceased to pretend--to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis--neither could have said how long it lasted--during which they were reduced, for al interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stil ness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant.

The spectator of whom they would thus wel have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion--or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetical y, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs. Assingham's dark, neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. Ful of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress--these The Legal Smal Print

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things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the south, or stil more of the east, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazel e. She was in fact, however, neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been, recordedly, her birthplace and "Europe" punctual y her discipline. She wore yel ow and purple because she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba than like a revendeuse; she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the overdressing. So she was covered and surrounded with

"things," which were frankly toys and shams, a part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to supply her friends. These friends were in the game that of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the beholder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity of it, from under the lids of Jerusalem. With her false indolence, in short, her false leisure, her false pearls and palms and courts and fountains, she was a person for whom life was multitudinous detail, detail that left her, as it at any moment found her, unappal ed and unwearied.

"Sophisticated as I may appear"--it was her frequent phrase--she had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do; it made her, as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two great holes to fil , and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they col ected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt.