My sister made a little pretended gesture of dismay.

“I should have been more careful; such things are of value.”

Of value indeed!  The certificates in Madame Barras’ package, that had lain about on the library table, were gold certificates of the United States Treasury — ninety odd of them, each of a value of one thousand dollars!  My sister went: 

“How oddly life has tossed her about . . . .  She must have been a mere infant at Miss Page’s.  The attachment of incoming tots to the older girls was a custom . . . .  I do not recall her . . . .  There was always a string of mites with shiny pigtails and big-eyed wistful faces.  The older girls never thought very much about them.  One has a swarm-memory, but individuals escape one.  The older girl, in these schools, fancied herself immensely.  The little satellite that attached itself, with its adoration, had no identity.  It had a nickname, I think, or a number . . . .  I have forgotten.  We minimized these midges out of everything that could distinguish them . . . .  Fancy one of these turning up in Madame Barras and coming to me on the memory of it.”

“It was extremely lucky for her,” I said.  “Imagine arriving from the interior of Brazil on the invitation of Mrs. Jordan to find that lady dead and buried; with no friend, until, by chance, one happened on your name in the social register, and ventured on a school attachment of which there might remain, perhaps a memory only on the infant’s side.”

My sister went on up the stair.

“I am glad we happened to be here, and, especially, Winthrop, if you have been able to assist her . . . .  She is charming.”

Charming was the word descriptive of my sister, for it is a thing of manner from a nature elevated and noble, but it was not the word for Madame Barras.  The woman was a lure.  I mean the term in its large and catholic sense.  I mean the bait of a great cosmic impulse — the most subtle and the most persistent of which one has any sense.

The cunning intelligences of that impulse had decked her out with every attractiveness as though they had taken thought to confound all masculine resistance; to sweep into their service those refractory units that withheld themselves from the common purpose.  She was lovely, as the aged Major Carrington had uttered it — great violet eyes in a delicate skin sown with gold flecks, a skin so delicate that one felt that a kiss would tear it!

I do not know from what source I have that expression but it attaches itself, out of my memory of descriptive phrases, to Madame Barras.  And it extends itself as wholly descriptive of her.  You will say that the long and short of this is that I was in love with Madame Barras, but I point you a witness in Major Carrington.

He had the same impressions, and he had but one passion in his life, a distant worship of my sister that burned steadily even here at the end of life.  During the few evenings that Madame Barras had been in to dinner with us, he sat in his chair beyond my sister in the drawing-room, perfect in his early-Victorian manner, while Madame Barras and I walked on the great terrace, or sat outside.