was startling, with strange histories, with wild cos
mopolite backward generations that accounted for
anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant
tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower,
the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with
free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid
uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts
and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the
marble of famous French chisels all this, to say
nothing of the effect of closer growths of the stem,
was to have had one's small world-space both
crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all
events effected an exchange; the elder friend had
been as consciously intellectual as possible, and the
younger, abounding in personal revelation, had
been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
poetry it was also history Mrs. Stringham
thought, to a finer tune even than Maeterlink and
Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She ap
pointed occasions for the reading of these authors
with her hostess, rather perhaps than actually
achieved great spans; but what they managed and
what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim
depths of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly
had she clutched her central clue. All her scruples
and hesitations, all her anxious enthusiasms, had re
duced themselves to a single alarm the fear that
she really might act on her companion clumsily and
coarsely. She was positively afraid of what she
might do to her, and to avoid that, to avoid it with

[[124]]

p123 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p124w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p125

v?