Leah, their only child, was the darling of their hearts and the apple of their eyes. To dress her beautifully, to give her all the best masters money could procure, and treat her to every amusement in London--theatres, the opera, all the concerts and shows there were, and give endless young parties for her pleasure--all this seemed the principal interest of their lives. Soon after my first introduction to Leah, Ida and I received an invitation to a kind of juvenile festivity at the Gibsons', and went, and spent a delightful evening. We were received by Mrs. Gibson most cordially. She was such an extremely pretty person, and so charmingly dressed, and had such winning, natural, genial manners, that I fell in love with her at first sight; she was also very playful and fond of romping; for she was young still, having married at seventeen. Her mother, Mrs. Bletchley (who was present), was a Spanish Jewess--a most magnificent and beautiful old person in splendid attire, tall and straight, with white hair and thick black eyebrows, and large eyes as black as night. In Leah the high Sephardic Jewish type was more marked than in Mrs. Gibson (who was not Jewish at all in aspect, and took after her father, the late Mr. Bletchley). It is a type that sometimes, just now and again, can be so pathetically noble and beautiful in a woman, so suggestive of chastity and the most passionate love combined--love conjugal and filial and maternal--love that implies all the big practical obligations and responsibilities of human life, that the mere term "Jewess" (and especially its French equivalent) brings to my mind some vague, mysterious, exotically poetic image of all I love best in woman. I find myself dreaming of Rebecca of York, as I used to dream of her in the English class at Brossard's, where I so pitied poor Ivanhoe for his misplaced constancy. If Rebecca at fifty-five, was at all like Mrs. Bletchley, poor old Sir Wilfred's regrets must have been all that Thackeray made them out to be in his immortal story of _Rebecca and Rowena_. Mr. Gibson was a good-looking man, some twelve or fifteen years older than his wife; his real vocation was to be a low comedian; this showed itself on my first introduction to him. He informally winked at me and said: "Esker voo ker jer dwaw lah vee? Ah! kel Bonnure!" This idiotic speech (all the French he knew) was delivered in so droll and natural a manner that I took to him at once. Barty himself couldn't have been funnier!