'"What has Eustace been about?" said Paul to me last night, after we had all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had been describing to me his talk with her. "He ought to have seen farther ahead. That creature is only just beginning to live--and it will be a life worth having! He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody. Of course we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant--yes, she is certainly ignorant,--though not so much as I imagined. But as for natural power and delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!" '"I don't know that Eustace did question them," I said; "he thought simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her, and never would have because of her popularity." 'To which Paul replied that, as far as he could make out, nobody thought more meanly of her popularity than she did, and he has been talking a great deal to her about her season. '"I never saw a woman at a more critical or interesting point of development," he exclaimed at last, striding up and down, and so absorbed in the subject that I could have almost laughed at his eagerness. "Something or other, luckily for her, set her on the right track three months ago, and it is apparently a nature on which nothing is lost. One can see it in the way in which she takes Venice: there isn't a scrap of her--little as she knows about it--that isn't keen and interested and wide-awake!" '"Well, after all," I reminded him as he was settling down to his books, "we know nothing about her as an actress." '"We shall see," he said; "I will find out something about that too before long."' * * * * * '_August_ 17-19. 'And so he has!