hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of conventional symmetry in the picture.  None but a woman of consummate breeding dared have done as she did.  It was not Southern suppleness that saved her from the charge of harsh audacity, but something of the kind of genius in her mood which has hurried the greater poets of sound and speech to impose their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the laws to have been our meagre limitations.

The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our ranks flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments in imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was indescribable:  a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.

That posture of Renee displeased Cecilia and fascinated her.  In an exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure displeasure:  but here was Nevil’s first love, the woman who loved him; and she was French.  After a continued study of her Cecilia’s growing jealousy betrayed itself in a conscious rivalry of race, coming to the admission that Englishwomen cannot fling themselves about on the floor without agonizing the graces:  possibly, too, they cannot look singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen archness; or talk animatedly without dipping in slang.  Conventional situations preserve them and interchange dignity with them; still life befits them; pre-eminently that judicial seat from which in briefest speech they deliver their judgements upon their foreign sisters.  Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her majestic place and caused her to envy in Renee things she would otherwise have disapproved.

At last she had seen the French lady’s likeness!  The effect of it was a horrid trouble in Cecilia’s cool blood, abasement, a sense of eclipse, hardly any sense of deserving worthiness:  ‘What am I but an heiress!’ Nevil had once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty.  But what is beauty when it is outshone!  Ask the owners of gems.  You think them rich; they are pining.

Then, too, this Renee, who looked electrical in repose, might really love Nevil with a love that sent her heart out to him in his enterprises, justifying and adoring him, piercing to the hero in his very thoughts.  Would she not see that his championship of the unfortunate man Dr. Shrapnel was heroic?

Cecilia surrendered the card to Rosamund, and it was out of sight when Beauchamp stepped in the drawing-room.  His cheeks were flushed; he had been one against three for the better part of an hour.

‘Are you going to show me the downs to-morrow morning?’ Cecilia said to him; and he replied, ‘You will have to be up early.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the colonel, at Beauchamp’s heels.

He was volunteering to join the party of two for the early morning’s ride to the downs.  Mr. Romfrey pressed his shoulder, saying, ’There’s no third horse can do it in my stables.’