With these brief interruptions, Cornelia pursued the even tenor of the story whose narration was the seal and token of her friendship. What moved her to tell it to Janet was not the idea of self-defence, or the hope of softening the shock a friend might receive on learning the details from a hostile critic. Quite the contrary. She was inordinately proud of her intimate connection with a man as famous as Percival Houghton; and she was altogether anxious that her friends should know of this connection in the form in which she wished it to be known and hoped to make it remembered. Two years had passed, she told Janet, since Percival Houghton came to the United States. He was a young Englishman, well connected, who had gained an immense vogue as an illustrator. He was said to have "isolated" several rare types of French and English female beauty, and fabulous sums had been paid for his portrait studies in pastel. His press agent having in advance widely advertised the artist’s announced purpose of adding the American girl to his pictorial conquests, his arrival was extremely good copy for the newspapers. Hutchins Burley, with an eye to the _Evening Chronicle’s_ large feminine clientele, did not let the opportunity slip by. He assigned Cornelia, then attached to his paper, to interview the ambitious Englishman. In her own words, "she went, she saw, she conquered." After the flattering notice in the _Chronicle_, Percival Houghton sought her out and attended her devotedly. Cornelia dwelt on the warm friendship that sprang up between them and on her own quick subjection to his great personal charm. "He was a wonderful man, Araminta. He had a great leonine head with wild flowing locks; there was fire in his eye and music in his voice; and he had that imperious way with him that opens a path straight to a woman’s heart." The week before his departure, he made an avowal of his passion. And she was in a paradise of ecstasy until the next day, when he sent her by mail a piece of information he had not had the courage to give her in person. He confessed to a wife and two children living in England. In a moment of impetuous boyish idealism—like Shelley’s, he said—he had married a girl who was intellectually (though not financially) his inferior. Worst of all, she shared none of his tastes or aspirations. He assured Cornelia that every day of his married existence had been a lifetime of exquisite torture.