Ten days later Kendal spent a long Monday evening in writing the following letter to his sister:—­

’Our yesterday’s expedition was, I think, a great success.  Mrs. Stuart was happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton’s first sight of the genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her out and watching her strong naive impressions of things.  Stuart, I think, was not quite happy.  It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours’ divorce from his briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection.  The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy.  But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises too much au serieux.

’I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton had developed towards each other.  Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind.  She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers’ end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is.  Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago but two subjects—­Jamaica and the stage—­the latter taken in a somewhat narrow sense.  Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her mind and Mrs. Stuart’s more frequently into contact with each other.  But I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton.  Her strong womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical delight in the girl’s beauty, and the little personal pride and excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the