Now if, upon a warm, soft, summer evening, you were suddenly asked to describe the perfect winter’s day, either you would have to stop and think a little, or your imagination is more elastic than mine.  Yet you might have a passionate preference for cold sun and bracing airs.  To me, Catherine Evers and this Mrs. Lascelles were as opposite to each other as winter and summer, or the poles, or any other notorious antitheses.  There was no comparison between them in my mind, yet as I sat with one among the sunlit, unfamiliar Alps, it was a distinct effort to picture the other in the little London room I knew so well.  For it was always among her books and pictures that I thought of Catherine, and to think was to wish myself there at her side, rather than to wish her here at mine.  Catherine’s appeal, I used to think, was to the highest and the best in me, to brain and soul, and young ambition, and withal to one’s love of wit and sense of humour.  Mrs. Lascelles, on the other hand, struck me primarily in the light of some splendid and spirited animal.  I still liked to dwell upon her dancing.  She satisfied the mere eye more and more.  But I had no reason to suppose that she knew right from wrong in art or literature, any more than she would seem to have distinguished between them in life itself.  Her Tauchnitz novel lay beside her on the grass and I again reflected that it would not have found a place on Catherine’s loftiest shelf.  Catherine would have raved about the view and made delicious fun of Quinby and the judge, and we should have sat together talking poetry and harmless scandal by the happy hour.  Mrs. Lascelles probably took place and people alike for granted.  But she had lived, and as an animal she was superb!  I looked again into her healthy face and speaking eyes, with their bitter knowledge of good and evil, their scorn of scorn, their redeeming honesty and candour.  The contrast was complete in every detail except the widowhood of both women; but I did not pursue it any farther; for once more there was but one woman in my thoughts, and she sat near me under a red parasol—­clashing so humanly with the everlasting snows!

“You don’t answer my question, Captain Clephane.  How much for your thoughts?”

“I’ll make you a present of them, Mrs. Lascelles.  I was beginning to think that a lot of rot has been written about the eternal snows and the mountain-tops and all the rest of it.  There a few lines in that last little volume of Browning—­”

I stopped of my own accord, for upon reflection the lines would have made a rather embarrassing quotation.  But meanwhile Mrs. Lascelles had taken alarm on other grounds.

“Oh, don’t quote Browning!”

“Why not?”

“He is far too deep for me; besides, I don’t care for poetry, and I was asking you about Mrs. Evers.”

“Well,” I said, with some little severity, “she’s a very clever woman.”

“Clever enough to understand Browning?”