conscientiousness and refinement due to the pressure of an organised and continuous tradition, and so on.  He realised that a good deal of what he said or suggested must naturally be lost upon her.  But it was delightful to feel her mind yielding to his, while it stimulated her sympathy and perhaps roused her surprise to find in him every now and then a grave and unpretending response to those moral enthusiasms in herself which were too real and deep for much direct expression.

’Whenever I am next in Paris, she said to him, when she perforce rose to go, with that pretty hesitation of manner which was so attractive in her, ’would you mind—­would Madame de Chateauvieux,—­if I asked you to introduce me to your sister?  It would be a great pleasure to me.’

Kendal made a very cordial reply, and they parted knowing more of each other than they had yet done.  Not that his leading impression of her was in any way modified.  Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful as a woman,—­had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience; but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of incompetence?  After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them.  Kendal was far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own person.  Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding them.  It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head perfectly cool on the subject of Miss Bretherton’s artistic claims, but he was conscious that it was not always very easy to do—­a consciousness that made him sometimes all the more recalcitrant under the pressure of her celebrity.

For it seemed to him that in society he heard of nothing but her—­her beauty, her fascination, and her success.  At every dinner-table he heard stories of her, some of them evident inventions, but all tending in the same direction—­that is to say, illustrating either the girl’s proud independence and her determination to be patronised by nobody, not even by royalty itself, or her lavish kind-heartedness and generosity towards the poor and the inferiors of her own profession.  She was for the moment the great interest of London, and people talked of her popularity and social prestige as a sign of the times and a proof of the changed position of the theatre and of those belonging to it.  Kendal thought it proved no more than that an extremely beautiful girl of irreproachable character, brought prominently before the public in any capacity whatever, is sure to stir the susceptible English heart, and that Isabel Bretherton’s popularity was not one which would in the long run affect the stage at all.  But he kept his reflections to himself, and in general talked about her no more than he was forced to do.  He had a sort of chivalrous feeling that those whom the girl had made in any degree her personal friends ought, as far as possible, to stand between her and this inquisitive excited public.  And it was plain to him that the enormous social success was not of her seeking, but of her relations.