of Frenchwomen.  Mrs Browning with beating heart stooped and kissed her hand.  They found in George Sand’s face no sweetness, but great moral and intellectual capacities; in manners and conversation she was absolutely simple.  Young men formed the company, to whom she addressed counsel and command with the utmost freedom and a conscious authority.  Through all her speech a certain undercurrent of scorn, a half-veiled touch of disdain, was perceptible.  At their parting she invited the English visitors to come again, kissed Mrs Browning on the lips, and received Browning’s kiss upon her hand.  The second call upon her was less agreeable.  She sat warming her feet in a circle of eight or nine ill-bred men, representatives of “the ragged Red diluted with the lower theatrical.”  If any other mistress of a house had behaved so unceremoniously, Browning declared that he would have walked out of the room; and Mrs Browning left with the impression—­“she does not care for me.”  They had exerted themselves to please her, but felt that it was in vain; “we couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t really touch her.”  Once Browning met her near the Tuileries and walked the length of the gardens with her arm upon his.  If nothing further was to come of it, at least they had seen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have discredited their travel.  Only to Mrs Browning’s mortification the spectacle wanted one detail indispensable to its completeness—­the characteristic cigarette was absent:  “Ah, but I didn’t see her smoke.”  Life leaves us always something to desire.

Before the close of June 1852 they were again in London, and found comfortable rooms at 58 Welbeck Street.  When the turmoil of the first days had subsided, they visited “Kenyon the Magnificent”—­so named by Browning—­at Wimbledon, at whose table Landor, abounding in life and passionate energy as in earlier days, was loud in his applause of the genius of Louis Napoleon.  Mazzini, his “intense eyes full of melancholy illusions,” called at their lodgings in company with Mrs Carlyle, who seemed to Mrs Browning not only remarkable for her play of ideas but attaching through her feelings and her character.[50] Florence Nightingale was also a welcome visitor, and her visit was followed by a gift of flowers.  Invitations from country houses came in sheaves, and the thought of green fields is seductive in a London month of July; but to remain in London was to be faithful to Penini—­and to the much-travelled Flush.  Once the whole household, with Flush included, breathed rural air for two days with friends at Farnham, and Browning had there the pleasure of meeting Charles Kingsley, whose Christian Socialism seemed wild and unpractical enough, but as for the man himself, brave, bold, original, full of a genial kindliness, Mrs Browning assures a correspondent that he could not be other than “good and noble let him say or dream what he will.”  It is stated by Mr W.M.  Rossetti that Browning first became acquainted with