ground he walks on.’  It is certain she deemed him the wisest, the noblest, the handsomest, the most gifted, of human kind.  That little gleam of mockery in her eye died out instantly when she looked at him, when she spoke of him or listened to him; instead, there came a tender light of love, and her face grew pale with the fervour of her affection.  Yet, when he jested, no one laughed more promptly or more heartily than she.  In those days I was perpetually trying to write fiction; and Old Childe was my inveterate hero.  I forget in how many ineffectual manuscripts, under what various dread disguises, he was afterwards reduced to ashes; I am afraid, in one case, a scandalous distortion of him got abroad in print.  Publishers are sometimes ill-advised; and thus the indiscretions of our youth may become the confusions of our age.  The thing was in three volumes, and called itself a novel; and of course the fatuous author had to make a bad business worse by presenting a copy to his victim.  I shall never forget the look Nina gave me when I asked her if she had read it; I grow hot even now as I recall it.  I had waited and waited expecting her compliments; and at last I could wait no longer, and so asked her; and she answered me with a look!  It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn’t months, before she took me back to her good graces.  But Old Childe was magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head, inscribed in the corner, ‘To Frankenstein from his Monster.’

V.

It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a cafe for her school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her father had a theory in his madness.  He was a Bohemian, not in practice only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic and authentic in one’s character, saved one from the artificial, and brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world; and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be ‘cloistered and contracted’ because of her sex.  ’What would not hurt my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter.  It will make a man of her—­without making her the less a woman.’  So he took her with him to the Cafe Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might have talked had she been absent.  As, in the greater number of his theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would scarcely consider edifying for our daughters’ ears; but he had his system, he knew what he was about.  ’The question whether you can touch pitch and remain undefiled,’ he said, ’depends altogether upon the spirit in which you approach it.  The realities of the world, the realities of life, the real things of God’s universe—­what