On another occasion he came across her in the afternoon at Mrs. Stuart’s.  The conversation turned upon his sister, Madame de Chateauvieux, for whom Mrs. Stuart had a warm but very respectful admiration.  They had met two or three times in London, and Madame de Chateauvieux’s personal distinction, her refinement, her information, her sweet urbanity of manner, had made a great impression upon the lively little woman, who, from the lower level of her own more commonplace and conventional success in society, felt an awe-struck sympathy for anything so rare, so unlike the ordinary type.  Her intimacy with Miss Bretherton had not gone far before the subject of ‘Mr. Kendal’s interesting sister’ had been introduced, and on this particular afternoon, as Kendal entered her drawing-room, his ear was caught at once by the sound of Marie’s name.  Miss Bretherton drew him impulsively into the conversation, and he found himself describing his sister’s mode of life, her interests, her world, her belongings, with a readiness such as he was not very apt to show in the public discussion of any subject connected with himself.  But Isabel Bretherton’s frank curiosity, her kindling eyes and sweet parted lips, and that strain of romance in her which made her so quickly responsive to anything which touched her imagination, were not easy to resist.  She was delightful to his eye and sense, and he was as conscious as he had ever been of her delicate personal charm.  Besides, it was pleasant to him to talk of that Parisian world, in which he was himself vitally interested, to any one so naive and fresh.  Her ignorance, which on the stage had annoyed him, in private life had its particular attractiveness.  And, with regard to this special subject, he was conscious of breaking down a prejudice; he felt the pleasure of conquering a great reluctance in her.  Evidently on starting in London she had set herself against everything that she identified with the great Trench actress who had absorbed the theatre-going public during the previous season; not from personal jealousy, as Kendal became ultimately convinced, but from a sense of keen moral revolt against Madame Desforets’s notorious position and the stories of her private life which were current in all circles.  She had decided in her own mind that French art meant a tainted art, and she had shown herself very restive—­Kendal had seen something of it on their Surrey expedition—­under any attempts to make her share the interest which certain sections of the English cultivated public feel in foreign thought, and especially in the foreign theatre.  Kendal took particular pains, when they glided off from the topic of his sister to more general matters, to make her realise some of the finer aspects of the French world of which she knew so little, and which she judged so harshly; the laborious technical training to which the dwellers on the other side of the channel submit themselves so much more readily than the English in any matter of art; the intellectual