’"What has Eustace been about?” said Paul to me last night, after we had all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had been describing to me his talk with her.  “He ought to have seen farther ahead.  That creature is only just beginning to live—­and it will be a life worth having!  He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody.  Of course we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant—­yes, she is certainly ignorant,—­though not so much as I imagined.  But as for natural power and delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!”

’"I don’t know that Eustace did question them,” I said; “he thought simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her, and never would have because of her popularity.”

’To which Paul replied that, as far as he could make out, nobody thought more meanly of her popularity than she did, and he has been talking a great deal to her about her season.

’"I never saw a woman at a more critical or interesting point of development,” he exclaimed at last, striding up and down, and so absorbed in the subject that I could have almost laughed at his eagerness.  “Something or other, luckily for her, set her on the right track three months ago, and it is apparently a nature on which nothing is lost.  One can see it in the way in which she takes Venice:  there isn’t a scrap of her—­little as she knows about it—­that isn’t keen and interested and wide-awake!”

’"Well, after all,” I reminded him as he was settling down to his books, “we know nothing about her as an actress.”

’"We shall see,” he said; “I will find out something about that too before long."’

* * * * *

’August 17-19.

’And so he has!

’Paul has been devoting himself more and more to the beauty, Mr. Wallace and I looking on with considerable amusement and interest; and this afternoon, finding it intolerable that Miss Bretherton has not even a bowing acquaintance with any of his favourite plays, Augier, Dumas, Victor Hugo, or anything else, he has been reading aloud to us in the garden, running on from scene to scene and speech to speech, translating as he went—­she in rapt attention, and he gesticulating and spouting, and, except for an occasional queer rendering that made us laugh, getting on capitally with his English.  She was enchanted; the novelty and the excitement of it absorbed her; and every now and then she would stop Paul with a little imperious wave of her hand, and repeat the substance of a speech after him with an impetuous elan, an energy, a comprehension, which drew little nods of satisfaction out of him, and sometimes produced a strong and startling effect upon myself and Mr. Wallace.  However, Mr. Wallace might stare as he liked; the two people concerned were totally unconscious of the rest of us, until at last, after the great death-scene in the Nuit Blanche, Paul threw down the book almost with a sob, and she, rising in a burst of feeling, held out her white arms towards an imaginary lover, and with extraordinary skill and memory repeated the substance of the heroine’s last speeches:—­