“To have prepared you a little?”--Vanderbank felt almost guilty. “I see--I should have liked to make more of it; though,” he added all lucidly, “I might so, by putting you on your guard, have caused myself to lose what, if you’ll allow me to say it, strikes me as one of the most touching tributes I’ve ever seen rendered to a woman. In fact, however, how could I know? I never saw Lady Julia, and you had in advance all the evidence I could have: the portrait--pretty bad, in the taste of the time, I admit--and the three or four photographs you must have noticed with it at Mrs. Brook’s. These things must have compared themselves for you with my photograph in there of the granddaughter. The similarity of course we had all observed, but it has taken your wonderful memory and your happy vision to put into it all the detail.” Mr. Longdon thought a moment, giving a dab with his pocket-handkerchief. “Very true--you’re quite right. It’s far beyond any identity in the pictures. But why did you tell me,” he added more sharply, “that she isn’t beautiful?” “You’ve deprived me,” Vanderbank laughed, “of the power of expressing civilly any surprise at your finding her so. But I said to you, please remember, nothing that qualified a jot my sense of the special stamp of her face. I’ve always positively found in it a recall of the type of the period you must be thinking of. It isn’t a bit modern. It’s a face of Sir Thomas Lawrence--” “It’s a face of Gainsborough!” Mr. Longdon returned with spirit. “Lady Julia herself harked back.” Vanderbank, clearly, was equally touched and amused. “Let us say at once that it’s a face of Raphael.” His old friend’s hand was instantly on his arm. “That’s exactly what I often said to myself of Lady Julia’s.” “The forehead’s a little too high,” said Vanderbank. “But it’s just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance.” Released by Lady Julia’s lover, the young man in turn grasped him as an encouragement to confidence. “It’s a face that should have the long side-ringlets of 1830. It should have the rest of the personal arrangement, the pelisse, the shape of bonnet, the sprigged muslin dress and the cross-laced sandals. It should have arrived in a pea-green ‘tilbury’ and be a reader of Mrs. Radcliffe. And all this to complete the Raphael!” Mr. Longdon, who, his discovery proclaimed, had begun, as might have been said, to live with it, looked hard a moment at his companion. “How you’ve observed her!” Vanderbank met it without confusion. “Whom haven’t I observed? Do you like her?” he then rather oddly and abruptly asked. The old man broke away again. “How can I tell--with such disparities?” “The manner must be different,” Vanderbank suggested. “And the things she says.”