Jenny returned presently with a small copy of Botticelli’s “Primavera,” which hung in her bedroom; and it was undoubtedly true that the figure of Flora might well have passed for a portrait of Isabel.  The nose was a little longer, that was all; but the rest of the face—­particularly the eyes and mouth—­was all but exact, and the general correspondence between the two faces in subtlety, strangeness, and, so to say, determined refinement, was complete.

“It is strange that I should have loved that face so,” said Jenny.

“It is very sweet of you,—­Jenny, I had almost said,—­but you are too kind to me, and a little selfish too—­you give me no time to admire you.  I wonder if Mr. Londonderry is modern enough to allow ladies to smoke in his study.”

And thus it comes out that Jenny often smoked there!

The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli, and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance.  At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the bourgeoisie.  So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.

A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were instantaneously attracted.  She stood very simply, with one hand lightly touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.

She began with some simple Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at home; then she recited a fairy poem called “The Forsaken Merman,” which, of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human pathos that it was more real than if it had been really “real,” that is, prosaic.

For impressing the imagination of her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion.  Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn’t have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow or an ebb of radiance in the eyes, a subtle sensitiveness of the lips and nerves; and her effect was mainly produced by her voice, over which she wielded indescribable powers of modulation.  It was a voice so sympathetic, so intimate, that it almost seemed too intimate, too appealingly sympathetic.  It was so a woman might recite to a man she loved,