which exactly prints Thisbe, and she who described Lutetia as soothing but uninteresting, like a patent food--her invalid’s fancies seem to cling to her. Cousin Christina is a little difficult to please; she dismissed the fresh-coloured, vigorous Alexandra very shortly as a nice thing growing in a garden, and when I hinted that Alexandra held views of her own she admitted that the creature had a strong scent. She permits herself these vagaries, these liberties with my acquaintances, the majority of whom she finds, I fear, a trifle limited. And she has a courage of expression which belongs, I am sure, only to the disembodied. Nothing rouses her to more impatience than the expression “quite a character.” Is it not deplorable and distressing, she demands, that we are not all characters? She herself was very much of a character, one could imagine soft, stupid, little women saying so, at meetings to dress dolls for zenanas, and how it would irritate her when the mild imputation was brought home to her. She is delightful to take one’s indignations to; she underlines every word, though she pretends a tolerance for the unintelligent which I am sure she does not feel. “Consider,” I almost heard her say, “if we clever ones of the world were not so few, how miserable the stupid ones would be! Secure in their grunting majority they let us smite them and turn the other cheek, but if they had to grunt solitarily!” She sometimes forgets, like that, that she is gone, is not. How sharp must have been the individuality that refuses so obstinately to blend with the universal current! In the simple mosaic here, put together at odd times, piece by piece rubbed up as it came and set in its place, many of the fragments are here. I know this because they are not things that would naturally occur to me, whereas they correspond exactly with the sentiments I know she used to hold. I have nevertheless written them out without scruple because she seems in a way to have given them to me. My possession in her is uncertain after all, hardly greater, I suppose, than a kind of constructive regret. Yet somehow I imagine it is more tangible than hers in the asters and the carnations. Her impressions were always strong and her affections always loyal; but divested, denuded as she is, I fancy it must be only the memory that flowers are beautiful that brings her here, poor ghost. CHAPTER XX