“Dear child!” said Isabel, kissing Jenny on her brow, “it is you that are wonderful.”

There is no joy in the world better worth seeing, better worth living, than the joy of young people with the same dreams, the same thoughts, and—­so important—­the same words for them, blown together by some unexpected conjunction of the four winds, met by some blissful dispensation of the planets of youth.

There have been periods in history especially favourable for the ecstasy of such meetings, early mornings of the human spirit, when lovely new truth and lovely new beauty were dawning wild and dewy in the strange east, and while the deep breathing of the older generations still asleep made a more wonderful loneliness of dawn, for the hushed and happy bands of young people holding each other’s hands and watching in the magic twilight.

To have been young in Italy in the time of Dante, in England in the time of Shakespeare, and to have met in such a mighty morning—­with danger too to keep us grateful.  Ah, we have missed those dawns; and yet I doubt if the whole recovered beauty of Greece and Rome, or the thrilling new fashions in romance and poetry wafted across the seas from Italy to help make Shakespeare, ever gave young people a keener thrill of newness and mystery than the books and pictures so eagerly discussed by the little group that gathered over supper that night in 3 Zion Place.

To have read “The House of Life!”—­to have seen the “Venus Verticordia”!  Ah! that was life!  And Isabel had actually been to Mr. G.F.  Watts’s studio—­walked about there a whole afternoon.  The young New Zioners looked at her.

“O Theophil, we must go to London,” cried Jenny.  She meant when they were married.

Theophil pressed her hand tenderly, as she impulsively sought his for sympathy, and his eyes left Isabel’s face a moment to smile a true “yes” into Jenny’s.

Of course no one had eyes for anyone but Isabel that night.  Was she not, as the announcements had said, “of London,” an ambassadress of beauty from the capital of the great queen?  There was really little she could tell these clever young people, who amazed and attracted her by their reality,—­the unrealities of “intensity” and “modernity” and the rest had, of course, already begun in London,—­but she represented to them the sparkle of the new beauty and truth they loved.  She knew little intimate anecdotes of the poets and painters they loved, piquant gossip and brilliant mots; and then she was one of those women who are like incense in a room, enriching by her very presence, exhaling mystery and distinction, like a pomander of strange spices.