’"It’s London,” she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that is so prettily pathetic.  “I have the roar in my ears all day, and it seems to be humming through my sleep at night.  And then the crowd, and the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things!  But I have only a few weeks more,” she added, brightening, “and then by October I shall be more used to Europe—­the climate and the life.”

’I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous strength is making against London.  All my nursing of you, Marie, and of our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton.  You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and constitution relaxed by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life.  I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle.  And all for what?  For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public!  There is a sense of tragic waste about it.  Suppose London destroys her health—­there are some signs of it—­what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it.  I long to step in, to “have at” somebody, to stop it.

’A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her.  We had moved on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood.  The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises.  The woman from the keeper’s cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene.  Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac’s method of character-drawing.  Are Eugene de Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point?  At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts:  Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling.  It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.  We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current.  She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.