After six months of our acquaintanceship had passed, M., an old schoolfellow of mine, took lodgings near me for the summer. She was a remarkable girl. If she was not beautiful, she was better-looking than I was, and she possessed a something, I know not what, more powerful than beauty to fascinate men. Perhaps it was her unconstrained naturalness. In walking, sitting, standing—whatever she did—her movements and attitudes were not impeded or unduly masked by artificial restrictions. I should not have called her profound, but what she said upon the commonest subjects was interesting, because it was so entirely her own. If she disliked a neighbour, she almost always disliked her for a reason which we saw, directly it was pointed out to us, to be just, but it was generally one which had not been given before. Her talk upon matters externally trivial was thus much more to me than many discourses upon the most important topics. On moral questions she expressed herself without any regard to prejudices. She did not controvert the authenticity of the ordinary standards, but nevertheless behaved as if she herself were her only law. The people in R., her little native borough, considered her to be dangerous, and I myself was once or twice weak enough to wonder that she held on a straight course with so little help from authority, forgetting that its support, in so far as it possesses any vital strength, is derived from the same internal source which supplied strength to her. When she came to S. she was unwell, and consulted my friend B. He did not at first quite like attending her, and she reported to me with great laughter how she had been told that he had made some inquiries about her from one of her neighbours at home with whom he happened to be acquainted, and how he had manœuvred in his visits to get the servants or the landlady into the room. I met him soon afterwards, and he informed me that he had a new patient. When he heard that I knew her—I did not say how much I knew—he became inquisitive, and at last, after much beating about the bush, knitting his eyebrows and lowering his voice, he asked me whether I was aware that she was not quite—quite _above suspicion_! My goodness, how I flamed up! I defended her with vehemence: I exaggerated her prudence and her modesty; I declared, what was the simple truth, that she was the last person in the world against whom such a scandalous insinuation should be directed, and that she was singularly inaccessible to vulgar temptation. I added that notwithstanding her seeming lawlessness she was not only remarkably sensitive to any accusation of bad manners, but that upon certain matters she could not endure even a joke. The only quarrel I remember to have had with her was when I lapsed into some commonplace jest about her intimacy with a music-master who gave her lessons. The way in which she took that jest I shall never forget. If I had made it to any other