In course of time this particular olive plant, like her sisters, picked up a smattering of certain branches of knowledge, and, armed thus, went out into the wide world to make her own way. Her knowledge was not extensive; it comprised a fluent power of speaking her mother-tongue with a pleasant tone and correct accent, but without any very well-grounded idea of why and wherefore it was so. She also knew a little French of doubtful quality, and a little less German that was distinctly off colour. She could copy a drawing in a woodenly accurate kind of way, with stodgy skies made chiefly of Chinese white, and exceedingly woolly trees largely helped out with the same useful composition. At that time there was no sham about Nora Browne’s pretensions to art--there they were, good, bad, or indifferent, and you might take them for what they were worth, which was not much. It was not until she had been Mrs. Mackenzie for some years that she took to "doing" the picture-galleries armed with catalogue and pencil, and talked learnedly about _chiar-oscuro_, about distance and atmosphere, about this school and that, this method or the other treatment. There were frequenters of the art-galleries of London to whom Mrs. Mackenzie, _née_ Nora Browne, was a delightful study; but then, on the other hand, there was a much larger number of persons than these whom she impressed deeply, and who even went so far as to speak of her with bated breath as "a power" on the press, while, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Mackenzie’s little paragraphs were very innocent, and not very remunerative, and generally won for the more or less weekly society papers in which they appeared a reputation for employing an art-critic who knew a good deal more about the frames than about the pictures within them. However, all this is a little by the way! I really only give these details of Mrs. Mackenzie’s doings to show that the family was, by virtue of their mother being a dabbler in journalism, in touch with the set which I saw the other day elegantly described as "Upper Bohemia."