Nancy had not responded to his call; it was, he supposed, his fault, but it was depressing. There was nothing injurious to Nancy in the comparison that suggested itself. He thought involuntarily of Lucy, how she would have laughed at Got’s acting, how lightly she would have come in and sat with him over the fire, and talked it all over, and enjoyed it a second time. All that this proved was the advantages of education--it proved nothing more--and he did not want to change Nancy for Lucy, or to abandon the ventures of this strange and alarming double existence, which, having once begun for him, could never end except by death. The little failures, the continual perils of opposition and resistance, excited at least, if they did not delight him. Life was no longer tame and monotonous whatever else might be said. CHAPTER III. Next day Arthur made a further experiment with his bride. It was one of the things he had promised her when they talked of Paris, and it had not occurred to him that the very name of the Louvre conveyed no idea to Nancy’s mind. She had been quite willing to accept it as something vaguely splendid which she was to see, but that was all. He took her across the broad sunshiny courts with a little thrill of expectation, chiefly pleasurable, yet with a touch of doubt in it which perhaps made it more exciting. Arthur was not himself very learned in art, nor an enthusiast about it. He knew what a young man of his breeding could scarcely escape knowing--he knew which were the pictures that everybody admires; he had all his life been accustomed to believe that he admired them, and what with association, what with faith, what with some natural sense of beauty, such as few minds are quite destitute of, he had liked to go and look at them from time to time when he was in the way of it, and had a certain acquaintance with the great galleries in all the places he had visited. He knew the Louvre well enough to know his way about, to be able to lead a neophyte from one great picture to another, and even to have his favourites in the Salon Carré. This does not necessitate a very high appreciation of art, or much real acquaintance with its productions; but yet it was as the highest knowledge and the wildest furore in comparison with the absolute ignorance and indifference which exists in the class from which Nancy was taken. A less intelligent girl than Nancy, proceeding from the slightly elevated social position at which it has become known that pictures are things to be admired, and that admiration of them is a proof of superiority both in rank and intellect, would have known how to acquit herself in such an emergency. She would have gone through these galleries with a gush of indiscriminate delight, finding everything beautiful, or at the worst would have taken her cue from her husband, and admired what he admired. But Nancy had not been educated even up to this point. She knew nothing