season.  It is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her in the best light.  Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in her turn evidently admires enormously her friend’s social capabilities and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs. Stuart’s kindness—­an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest complaisance towards all the Stuarts’ friends, and in a constant watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.

’However, here I am as usual wasting time in analysis instead of describing to you our Sunday.  It was one of those heavenly days with which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty.  We found a carriage waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region in some virgin continent.  On either hand the gorse was thick and golden, great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist grass beneath, and over the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose into the sky in masses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle of white set in the environing blue.

’Then came the farmhouse—­old, red-brick, red-tiled, casemented—­everything that the aesthetic soul desires—­the farmer and his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the parlour, with its last-century woodwork.

’Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch.  I never knew him more racy; he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, illustrated by sketches, made in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has condescended to take this year.  They range from a bishop and a royalty down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his presentation of the characteristic attitudes of each—­those attitudes which, according to him, betray the “inner soul” of the bishop or the foundling—­was admirable.  Then he fell upon the Academy—­that respected body of which I suppose he will soon be the President—­and tore it limb from limb.  With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at the Academy dinners of the future—­supposing fortune ever exalts me again as she did this year to that august meal—­I hardly know.  Millais’s faces, Pettie’s knights, or Calderon’s beauties—­all fared the same.  You could not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.