As for Miss Hope, she was to Heather, saving by correspondence, an utter stranger. Never in her life had the present mistress of Berrie Down Hollow set eyes on the sister of the lady who had once reigned there supreme. For more than seven years Miss Hope had wandered to and fro on the earth. She had wintered here; she had summered there. She had been returning every season to London; and every season she heard of some fresh plan, or met with some fresh person, that induced her to defer her intention of coming back to England. Bohemianism is not confined to one sex or class in the community, and there are numbers of forlorn spinsters and lonely widows, running loose about the Continent, frequenting British watering-places and foreign spas, picking up acquaintances in railway carriages and at table d’hôtes, who would be greatly disgusted if they were assured that the lives of the men they call Bohemians in London are infinitely more useful, and quite as respectable, as theirs;—wandering women, who have no care for the Lares and Penates of the ordinary English home, whose talk is of art and of far-away cathedrals, of foreign cookery and Rhine wines, who have got up to see the sun rise in every country except their own, who go in for passports instead of Sunday-schools, who sit next “our own correspondent” at dinner-parties on their return to London, and converse with him concerning Rome and Vienna, when they mutually agree that the Continent is the place to live, that the man, woman, or child, who is content to reside in England, should be sent to the Asylum for Idiots at once. These are the people who ask young girls whether they have been abroad, and, on receiving an answer in the negative, remark that they envy them. If any one have the temerity to inquire why, they reply, “Because she has never seen Paris, and the first sight of Paris is something worth living for.” Beyond climate and cheapness, and being able to do as one likes, these Bohemians never can give a reason for the faith that is in them; but that they hold such faith sincerely is certain. “Everything is so different,” they declare, if pressed on the subject; “the cooking, for instance.” “It is, and I detest messes,” says some plain-spoken John Bull; whereupon the elderly Bohemian inquires, “whether the speaker has ever dined at Zapoli’s?” implying thereby that he is utterly ignorant of the subject about which he has been talking.