’She makes me think of a painting sometimes, one that changes in appearance with the varying lights and shadows of the sky.  But, Edge, given the exact light that her beauty needs, she is a masterpiece.  In some strange way her personality has given me a new pleasure in Corot and Diaz.  It is difficult to explain, but it is so.  I feel my powers of description are inadequate really to picture Elise to you.  She is truly feminine, and yet when she is with other women her unique gift of personality makes them merely feminine.  “Lordy, Lordy,” as a nigger of mine used to say, “dis am becomin’ abtuse.”

’As a matter of fact, the girl is a result of conflicting elements of heredity.  I haven’t met her father, but I gather that he is a good old Tory of blameless respectability, and has a deep-seated disbelief in evolution.  On the other hand, the girl’s mother is rather a buxom and florid descendant of a vigorous North of England family, the former members of which, with the exception of her father, were highly esteemed smugglers.  The lady’s grandfather, Elise tells me, was known as “Gentleman Joe,” and was as adventurous a cut-throat as a small boy’s imagination could desire.

’Well, Mr. Parson, you can imagine what happened when these conflicting elements of heredity were brought together.  In the language of science, there was one negative result and two positive.  The first mentioned is a son Malcolm, whom I have not met.  He has a commission in the cavalry, is a devil at billiards, can’t read a map, and rides like a Centaur.

’Of the positive results it seems to me I may have already mentioned one—­Elise.  The other is Richard, the tragedy of the family.  Poor Dick was practically kicked out of Eton for drunkenness when he was about sixteen.  For the past year or so he has been at Cambridge, but he got in with a bad set there, and after several warnings has been “sent down”—­or, in ordinary language, expelled.  It appears that the old combination of “booze” and women got the better of him, though there’s something oddly fine about the fellow too.  He was hitting an awful pace at Cambridge, and when he tried to pass off a fourth-rate chorus-girl as the Duchess of Turveydrop, the axe descended.  As the masquerading duchess was rather noisy and very “elevated,” you can see that there must have been complications.

’Of course, his governor was furious, and, settling a very small allowance on the poor beggar, turned him out of the family home, and forbade him to ever darken, &c., &c. (see, split infinitive and all, any “best seller” of a few years back).

’Does this seem at all incongruous to you?  These so-called aristocrats bring a son into existence, and, providing he’s a decent-living, rule-abiding chap, he is sheltered from the world and kept for the enriching of their own hot-house of respectability.  But—­if one of them upsets the ash-can and otherwise messes up the family escutcheon, the father says, “You have disgraced our traditions.  Get thee hence into the cold, outside world.  After this you belong to it.”