“I met her at a lecture I was giving. Somebody or other on the platform introduced us. I had noticed her big eyes fixed on me, and her lips parted, following every word I said. It was flattering. She implored me to call. It was because I wrote books. I went because I liked her. She was an audience in herself! And her home! She has, I could see, a hard fight of it, poor little thing, to cultivate culture there. It was quite pathetic to see her straining every nerve to be modern and morbid and blasée, as she thinks we are in London. But give me the provinces for morbidity and unconscious Ibsenism! In spite of her amusing little affectations and preciousnesses, she is a dear little woman, and I think I shall ask her to come and stay with me in town--there is no one who would enjoy it more. If I do, you must come and meet her, you would like her. Pretty, too, though I don’t think you care much about that. But so intensely interested in everything, so eager, too nervous, perhaps, to be soothing, a woman with more brain than temperament, and perhaps not so very much of that. Incapable, I should think, of a grande passion, but so anxious to have one! She is really to be pitied, I think, for the milieu she lives in is naturally abhorrent to one of her way of thinking. It is unfortunately that of nine-tenths of her class, the provincial women whose wits outrun their opportunities, and their aspirations their social possibilities. The type is so sadly common. English Madame Bovarys! “She has a husband, but I did not see him. I was going to dine there to meet him, but she put me off. Perhaps he explains her. At any rate, from what she told me, and allowing for her very strong bias, he furnishes a very good excuse for any vagaries she may choose to commit. I believe he drinks, though she did not say so, and I respected her for not giving him away. An ordinary, middle-class brute, my dear Edmund, incapable of making even a goose happy, far less a woman who has educated herself into some of the subtleties of refinement. “I don’t know why I write all this about a perhaps not specially interesting person, but--her eyes--when she looked at me, and was not posing!--were the eyes of a prisoner. I see them now!” Interesting as this document was to the subject of it, there were things about it that she did not quite like. She was silent for a little time, quite ten minutes. Then an irresistible impulse prompted her to say, “I happen to know that woman Egidia writes of, very well.” “Do you really? Then perhaps I ought not to have shown you the letter. One never knows.” “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Phœbe Elles is one of my greatest friends--poor thing!” “Why poor thing?” “Oh, don’t you know--she is one of the unhappy ones. She made the usual mistake, ten years ago, and has been repenting it ever since.” “What was that?”