of her nature, that she had of late, for so many reasons, been unable to gratify.  She had taken her leave, with her thanks—­she knew her way quite enough; it being also sufficiently the case that she had even a shy hope of not going too straight.  To wander a little wild was what would truly amuse her; so that, keeping clear of Oxford Street and cultivating an impression as of parts she didn’t know, she had ended with what she had more or less had been fancying, an encounter with three or four shops—­an old bookseller’s, an old printmonger’s, a couple of places with dim antiquities in the window—­that were not as so many of the other shops, those in Sloane Street, say; a hollow parade which had long since ceased to beguile.  There had remained with her moreover an allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before—­seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in Bloomsbury such “funny little fascinating” places and even sometimes such unexpected finds.  There could perhaps have been no stronger mark than this sense of well-nigh romantic opportunity—­no livelier sign of the impression made on her, and always so long retained, so watchfully nursed, by any observation of Charlotte’s, however lightly thrown off.  And then she had felt, somehow, more at her ease than for months and months before; she didn’t know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly, had done it; it was as if she hadn’t come into so many noble and beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn possibly to something still worse.  “I believed in him again as much as ever, and I felt how I believed in him,” she said with bright, fixed eyes; “I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having, for the moment, to wonder and watch; having, on the contrary, almost nothing on my mind.”

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father’s birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick up for it.  They would keep it at Fawns, where they had kept it before—­since it would be the twenty-first of the month; and she mightn’t have another chance of making sure of something to offer him.  There was always the impossibility, of course, of finding him anything, the least bit “good,” that he wouldn’t already, long ago, in his rummagings, have seen himself—­and only not to think a quarter good enough; this, however, was an old story, and one could not have had any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the friendship’s offering, was, by a rigorous law of nature, a foredoomed aberration, and that the more it was so the more it showed, and the more one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been.  The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy;