"I am sure I hardly know how I am to do you service, Lady R--, if I do not write for you." "I daresay not, but when I tell you that I am more than repaid by looking at you when I feel inclined, you will acknowledge that you do me service; but we will not enter into metaphysics or psychological questions just now, it shall all be explained by-and-bye. And now the first service I ask of you is at once to leap over the dull fortnight of gradual approaching, which at last ends in intimacy. I have ever held it to be a proof of the suspiciousness of our natures and unworthy. You must allow me to call you Valerie at once, and I must entreat of you to call me Sempronia. Your name is delightful, fit for a first-class heroine. My real baptismal name is one that I have abjured, and if my godfathers and godmothers did give it to me, I throw it back to them with contempt. What do you think it was?--Barbara. Barbara, indeed. `My mother had a _maid_ called Barbara,' Shakespeare says, and such a name should be associated with brooms and yellow soap. Call me Sempronia from this time forward, and you confer a favour on me. And now I must write a little, so take a book and a seat on the sofa, for, at the opening of this chapter my heroine is exactly in that position, `in maiden meditation, fancy free.'" CHAPTER SEVEN. Lady R--sat down before her writing materials, and I took my seat on the sofa, as she had requested, and was soon occupied with my reading. I perceived that, as she wrote, her ladyship continually took her eyes off her paper, and fixed them upon me. I presumed that she was describing me, and I was correct in my idea, for, in about half-an-hour, she threw down her pen, and cried: "There, I am indebted to you for the best picture of a heroine that I ever drew! Listen." And her ladyship read to me a most flattering description of my sweet person, couched in very high-flown language. "I think, Lady R--," said I, when she had finished, "that you are more indebted to your own imagination than to reality in drawing my portrait." "Not so, not so, my dear Valerie. I may have done you justice, but certainly not more. There is nothing like having the living subject to write from. It is the same as painting or drawing, it only can be true when drawn from nature; in fact, what is writing but painting with the pen?" As she concluded her sentence, the page, Lionel, came in with a letter on a waiter, and hearing her observation, as he handed the letter, he impudently observed: "Here's somebody been painting your name on the outside of this paper; and as there's 7 pence to pay, I think it's rather dear for such a smudge."