THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.—APRIL, 1877.—No. 4.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON & CO., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.

M. Francisque Sarcey, the dramatic critic of the Paris "Temps," and the gentleman who, of the whole journalistic fraternity, holds the fortune of a play in the hollow of his hand, has been publishing during the last year a series of biographical notices of the chief actors and actresses of the first theatre in the world. "Comédiens et Comédiennes: la Comédie Française"—such is the title of this publication, which appears in monthly numbers of the Librairie des Bibliophiles, and is ornamented on each occasion with a very prettily etched portrait, by M. Gaucherel, of the artist to whom the number is devoted. By lovers of the stage in general, and of the Théâtre Français in particular, the series will be found most interesting; and I welcome the pretext for saying a few words about an institution which—if such language be not hyperbolical—I passionately admire. I must add that the portrait is incomplete, though for the present occasion it is more than sufficient. The list of M. Sarcey's biographies is not yet filled up; three or four, those of Mme. Favart and of MM. Fèbvre and Delaunay, are still wanting. Nine numbers, however, have appeared—the first being entitled "La Maison de Molière," and devoted to a general account of the great theatre; and the others treating of its principal sociétaires and pensionnaires in the following order:

• Regnier,
• Got,
• Sophie Croizette,
• Sarah Bernhardt,
• Coquelin,
• Madeleine Brohan,
• Bressant,
• Mme. Plessy.

(This order, by the way, is purely accidental; it is not that of age or of merit.) It is always entertaining to encounter M. Francisque Sarcey, and the reader who, during a Paris winter, has been in the habit, of a Sunday evening, of unfolding his "Temps" immediately after unfolding his napkin, and glancing down first of all to see what this sturdy feuilletoniste has found to his hand—such a reader will find him in great force in the pages before us. It is true that, though I myself confess to being such a reader, there are moments when I grow rather weary of M. Sarcey, who has in an eminent degree both the virtues and the defects which attach to the great French characteristic—the habit of taking terribly au sérieux anything that you may set about doing. Of this habit of abounding in one's own cause, of expatiating, elaborating, reiterating, refining, as if for the hour the fate of mankind were bound up with one's particular topic, M. Sarcey is a capital and at times an almost comical representative. He talks about the theatre once a week as if—honestly, between himself and his reader—the theatre were the only thing in this frivolous world that is worth seriously talking about. He has a religious respect for his theme, and he holds that if a thing is to be done at all, it must be done in detail as well as in the gross.

It is to this serious way of taking the matter, to his thoroughly businesslike and professional attitude, to his unwearying attention to detail, that the critic of the "Temps" owes his enviable influence and the weight of his words. Add to this that he is sternly incorruptible. He has his admirations, but they are honest and discriminating; and whom he loveth he very often chasteneth. He is not ashamed to commend Mlle. X., who has only had a curtsey to make, if her curtsey has been the curtsey of the situation; and he is not afraid to overhaul M. A., who has delivered the tirade of the play, if M. A. has failed to hit the mark. Of course his judgment is good; when I have had occasion to measure it, I have usually found it excellent. He has the scenic sense—the theatrical eye. He knows at a glance what will do, and what won't do. He is shrewd and sagacious and almost tiresomely in earnest, but this closes the list of his attractions. He is not witty—to speak of; and he is not graceful; he is heavy and common, and above all what is familiarly called "shoppy." He leans his elbows on his desk, and does up his weekly budget into a parcel the reverse of coquettish. You can fancy him a grocer retailing tapioca and hominy—full weight for the price; his style seems a sort of integument of brown paper. But the fact remains that if M. Sarcey praises a play, the play has a run; and that if M. Sarcey says it won't do, it does not do at all. If M. Sarcey devotes an encouraging line and a half to a young actress, mademoiselle is immediately lancée; she has a career. If he bestows a quiet "bravo" on an obscure comedian, the gentleman may forthwith renew his engagement. When you make and unmake fortunes at this rate, what matters it whether you have a little elegance the more or the less?

Elegance is for M. Paul de St. Victor, who does the theatres in the "Moniteur," and who, though he writes a style only a trifle less pictorial than that of Théophile Gautier himself, has never, to the best of my belief, brought clouds or sunshine to any playhouse. I may add, to finish with M. Sarcey, that he contributes a daily political article—generally devoted to watching and showing up the "game" of the clerical party—to Edmond About's journal, the "XIX^ième Siècle"; that he gives a weekly conférence on current literature; that he "confers" also on those excellent Sunday morning performances now so common in the French theatres, during which examples of the classic repertory are presented, accompanied by a light lecture upon the history and character of the play. As the commentator on these occasions M. Sarcey is in great demand, and he officiates sometimes in small provincial towns. Lastly, frequent playgoers in Paris observe that the very slenderest novelty is sufficient to insure at a theatre the (very considerable) physical presence of the conscientious critic of the "Temps." If he were remarkable for nothing else, he would be remarkable for the fortitude with which he exposes himself to the pestiferous climate of the Parisian temples of the drama.

For these agreeable "notices" M. Sarcey appears to have mended his pen and to have given a fillip to his fancy. They are gracefully and often lightly turned; occasionally, even, the author grazes the epigrammatic. They deal, as is proper, with the artistic and not with the private physiognomy of the ladies and gentlemen whom they commemorate; and though they occasionally allude to what the French call "intimate" matters, they contain no satisfaction for the lovers of scandal. The Théâtre Français, in the face it presents to the world, is an austere and venerable establishment, and a frivolous tone about its affairs would be almost as much out of keeping as if applied to the Académie herself. M. Sarcey touches upon the organization of the theatre, and gives some account of the different phases through which it has passed during these latter years. Its chief functionary is a general administrator, or director, appointed by the State, which enjoys this right in virtue of the considerable subsidy which it pays to the house; a subsidy amounting, if I am not mistaken (M. Sarcey does not mention the sum), to 250,000 francs. The director, however, is not an absolute, but a constitutional ruler; for he shares his powers with the society itself, which has always had a large deliberative voice.

Whence, it may be asked, does the society derive its light and its inspiration? From the past, from precedent, from tradition—from the great unwritten body of laws which no one has in his keeping, but many in their memory, and all in their respect. The principles on which the Théâtre Français rests are a good deal like the common law of England—a vaguely and inconveniently registered mass of regulations which time and occasion have welded together, and from which the recurring occasion can usually manage to extract the rightful precedent. Napoleon I., who had a finger in every pie in his dominion, found time during his brief and disastrous occupation of Moscow to send down a decree remodelling and regulating the constitution of the theatre. This document has long been a dead letter, and the society abides by its older traditions. The traditions of the Comédie Française—that is the sovereign word, and that is the charm of the place—the charm that one never ceases to feel, however often one may sit beneath the classic, dusky dome. One feels this charm with peculiar intensity as a newly arrived foreigner. The Théâtre Français has had the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theatre which is not as other theatres are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a peculiar perfection—something consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of tranquil ecstasy.

Never has he seen anything so smooth, and harmonious, so artistic and complete. He heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves the name. He sees dramatic effort refined to a point with which the English stage is unacquainted. He sees that there are no limits to possible "finish," and that so trivial an act as taking a letter from a servant or placing one's hat on a chair may be made a suggestive and interesting incident. He sees these things and a great many more besides, but at first he does not analyze them; he gives himself up to sympathetic contemplation. He is in an ideal and exemplary world—a world that has managed to attain all the felicities that the world we live in misses. The people do the things that we should like to do; they are gifted as we should like to be; they have mastered the accomplishments that we have had to give up. The women are not all beautiful—decidedly not, indeed—but they are graceful, agreeable, sympathetic, ladylike; they have the best manners possible, and they are delightfully well dressed. They have charming musical voices, and they speak with irreproachable purity and sweetness; they walk with the most elegant grace, and when they sit it is a pleasure to see their attitudes. They go out and come in, they pass across the stage, they talk, and laugh, and cry, they deliver long tirades or remain statuesquely mute; they are tender or tragic, they are comic or conventional; and through it all you never observe an awkwardness, a roughness, an accident, a crude spot, a false note.

As for the men, they are not handsome either; it must be confessed, indeed, that at the present hour manly beauty is but scantily represented at the Théâtre Français. Bressant, I believe, used to be thought handsome; but Bressant has retired, and among the gentlemen of the troupe I can think of no one but M. Mounet-Sully who may be positively commended for his fine person. But M. Mounet-Sully is, from the scenic point of view, an Adonis of the first magnitude. To be handsome, however, is for an actor one of the last necessities; and these gentlemen are mostly handsome enough. They look perfectly what they are intended to look, and in cases where it is proposed that they shall seem handsome, they usually succeed. They are as well mannered and as well dressed as their fairer comrades, and their voices are no less agreeable and effective. They represent gentlemen, and they produce the illusion. In this endeavor they deserve even greater credit than the actresses, for in modern comedy, of which the repertory of the Théâtre Français is largely composed, they have nothing in the way of costume to help to carry it off. Half a dozen ugly men, in the periodic coat and trousers and stove-pipe hat, with blue chins and false moustaches, strutting before the footlights, and pretending to be interesting, romantic, pathetic, heroic, certainly play a perilous game. At every turn they suggest prosaic things, and their liabilities to awkwardness are increased a thousand fold. But the comedians of the Théâtre Français are never awkward, and when it is necessary they solve triumphantly the problem of being at once realistic to the eye and romantic to the imagination.

I am speaking always of one's first impression of them. There are spots on the sun, and you discover after a while that there are little irregularities at the Théâtre Français. But the acting is so incomparably better than any that you have seen, that criticism for a long time is content to lie dormant. I shall never forget how at first I was under the charm. I liked the very incommodities of the place; I am not sure that I did not find a certain mystic salubrity in the bad ventilation. The Théâtre Français, it is known, gives you a good deal for your money. The performance, which rarely ends before midnight, and sometimes transgresses it, frequently begins by seven o'clock. The first hour or two is occupied by secondary performers; but not for the world at this time would I have missed the first rising of the curtain. No dinner could be too hastily swallowed to enable me to see, for instance, Mme. Nathalie in Octave Feuillet's charming little comedy of "Le Village." Mme. Nathalie was a plain, stout old woman, who did the mothers, and aunts, and elderly wives; I use the past tense because she retired from the stage a year ago, leaving a most conspicuous vacancy. She was an admirable actress, and a perfect mistress of laughter and tears. In "Le Village" she played an old provincial bourgeoise whose husband takes it into his head, one winter night, to start on the tour of Europe with a roving bachelor friend, who has dropped down on him at supper-time, after the lapse of years, and has gossiped him into momentary discontent with his fireside existence. My pleasure was in Mme. Nathalie's figure when she came in dressed to go out to vespers across the place. The two foolish old cronies are over their wine, talking of the beauty of the women on the Ionian coast; you hear the church bell in the distance. It was the quiet felicity of the old lady's dress that used to charm me; the Comédie Française was in every fold of it. She wore a large black silk mantilla, of a peculiar cut, which looked as if she had just taken it tenderly out of some old wardrobe where it lay folded in lavender, and a large dark bonnet, adorned with handsome black silk loops and bows. Her big pale face had a softly frightened look, and in her hand she carried her neatly kept breviary. The extreme suggestiveness, and yet the taste and temperance of this costume, seemed to me inimitable; the bonnet alone, with its handsome, decent, virtuous bows, was worth coming to see. It expressed all the rest, and you saw the excellent, pious woman go pick her steps churchward among the puddles, while Jeannette, the cook, in a high white cap, marched before her in sabots, with a lantern.

Such matters are trifles, but they are representative trifles, and they are not the only ones that I remember. It used to please me, when I had squeezed into my stall—the stalls at the Français are extremely uncomfortable—to remember of how great a history the large, dim salle around me could boast: how many great things had happened there; how the air was thick with associations. Even if I had never seen Rachel, it was something of a consolation to think that those very footlights had illumined her finest moments, and that the echoes of her mighty voice were sleeping in that dingy dome. From this to musing upon the "traditions" of the place, of which I spoke just now, was of course but a step. How were they kept? by whom, and where? Who trims the undying lamp and guards the accumulated treasure? I never found out—by sitting in the stalls; and very soon I ceased to care to know. One may be very fond of the stage, and yet care little for the green room; just as one may be very fond of pictures and books, and yet be no frequenter of studios and authors' dens. They might pass on the torch as they would behind the scenes; so long as, during my time, they didn't let it drop, I made up my mind to be satisfied. And that one could depend upon their not letting it drop became a part of the customary comfort of Parisian life. It became certain that the "traditions" were not mere catchwords, but a most beneficent reality.

Going to the other Parisian theatres helps you to believe in them. Unless you are a voracious theatre-goer you give the others up; you find they don't pay; the Français does for you all that they do and so much more besides. There are two possible exceptions—the Gymnase and the Palais Royal, The Gymnase, since the death of Mlle. Desclée, has been under a heavy cloud; but occasionally, when a month's sunshine rests upon it, there is a savor of excellence in the performance. But you feel that you are still within the realm of accident; the delightful security of the Rue de Richelieu is wanting. The young lover is liable to be common, and the beautifully dressed heroine to have an unpleasant voice. The Palais Royal has always been in its way very perfect; but its way admits of great imperfection. The actresses are classically bad, though usually pretty, and the actors are much addicted to taking liberties. In broad comedy, nevertheless, two or three of the latter are not to be surpassed, and (counting out the women) there is usually something masterly in a Palais Royal performance. In its own line it has what is called style, and it therefore walks, at a distance, in the footsteps of the Français. The Odéon has never seemed to me in any degree a rival of the Théâtre Français, though it is a smaller copy of that establishment. It receives a subsidy from the State, and is obliged by its contract to play the classic repertory one night in the week. It is on these nights, listening to Molière or Marivaux, that you may best measure the superiority of the greater theatre. I have seen actors at the Odéon, in the classic repertory, imperfect in their texts; a monstrously insupposable case at the Comédie Française. The function of the Odéon is to operate as a pépinière or nursery for its elder—to try young talents, shape them, make them flexible, and then hand them over to the upper house. The more especial nursery of the Français, however, is the Conservatoire Dramatique, an institution dependent upon the State, through the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whose budget is charged with the remuneration of its professors. Pupils graduating from the Conservatoire with a prize have ipso facto the right to débuter at the Théâtre Français, which retains them or lets them go, according to its discretion. Most of the first subjects of the Français have done their two years' work at the Conservatoire, and M. Sarcey holds that an actor who has not had that fundamental training which is only to be acquired there, never obtains a complete mastery of his resources. Nevertheless some of the best actors of the day have owed nothing to the Conservatoire—Bressant, for instance, and Aimée Desclée, the latter of whom, indeed, never arrived at the Français. (Molière and Balzac were not of the Academy, and so Mlle. Desclée, the first actress after Rachel, died without acquiring the privilege which M. Sarcey says is the day-dream of all young theatrical women—that of printing on their visiting cards, after their name, de la Comédie Française.)

The Théâtre Français has, moreover, the right to do as Molière did—to claim its property wherever it finds it. It may stretch out its long arm and break the engagement of a promising actor at any of the other theatres; of course after a certain amount of notice given. So, last winter, it notified to the Gymnase its danger of appropriating Worms, the admirable jeune premier, who, returning from a long sojourn in Russia, and taking the town by surprise, had begun to retrieve the shrunken fortunes of that establishment.

On the whole, it may be said that the great talents find their way, sooner or later, to the Théâtre Français. This is of course not a rule that works unvaryingly, for there are a great many influences to interfere with it. Interest as well as merit—especially in the case of the actresses—weighs in the scale; and the ire that may exist in celestial minds has been known to manifest itself in the councils of the Comédie. Moreover, a brilliant actress may prefer to reign supreme at one of the smaller theatres; at the Français, inevitably, she shares her dominion. The honor is less, but the comfort is greater.

Nevertheless, at the Français, in a general way, there is in each case a tolerably obvious artistic reason for membership; and if you see a clever actor remain outside for years, you may be pretty sure that, though private reasons count, there are artistic reasons as well. The first half dozen times I saw Mlle. Fargueil, who for years ruled the roost, as the vulgar saying is, at the Vaudeville, I wondered that so consummate and accomplished an actress should not have a place on the first French stage. But I presently grew wiser, and perceived that, clever as Mlle. Fargueil is, she is not for the Rue de Richelieu, but for the Boulevards; her peculiar, intensely Parisian intonation would sound out of place in the Maison de Molière. (Of course if Mlle. Fargueil has ever received overtures from the Français, my sagacity is at fault—I am looking through a millstone. But I suspect she has not.) Frédéric Lemaître, who died last winter, and who was a very great actor, had been tried at the Français and found wanting—for those particular conditions. But it may probably be said that if Frédéric was wanting, the theatre was too, in this case. Frédéric's great force was his extravagance, his fantasticality; and the stage of the Rue de Richelieu was a trifle too academic. I have even wondered whether Desclée, if she had lived, would have trod that stage by right, and whether it would have seemed her proper element. The negative is not impossible. It is very possible that in that classic atmosphere her great charm—her intensely modern quality, her supersubtle realism—would have appeared an anomaly. I can imagine even that her strange, touching, nervous voice would not have seemed the voice of the house. At the Français you must know how to acquit yourself of a tirade; that has always been the touchstone of capacity. It would probably have proved Desclée's stumbling-block, though she could utter speeches of six words as no one else surely has ever done. It is true that Mlle. Croizette, and in a certain sense Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, are rather weak at their tirades; but then old theatre-goers will tell you that these young ladies, in spite of a hundred attractions, have no business at the Français.

In the course of time the susceptible foreigner passes from that superstitious state of attention which I just now sketched to that greater enlightenment which enables him to understand such a judgment as this of the old theatre-goers. It is borne in upon him that, as the good Homer sometimes nods, the Théâtre Français sometimes lapses from its high standard. He makes various reflections. He thinks that Mlle. Favart rants. He thinks M. Mounet-Sully, in spite of his delicious voice, insupportable. He thinks that M. Parodi's five-act tragedy, "Rome Vaincue," presented in the early part of the present winter, was better done certainly than it would have been done upon any English stage, but by no means so much better done than might have been expected. (Here, if I had space, I would open a long parenthesis, in which I should aspire to demonstrate that the incontestable superiority of average French acting to English is by no means so strongly marked in tragedy as in comedy—is indeed sometimes not strongly marked at all. The reason of this is in a great measure, I think, that we have had Shakespeare to exercise ourselves upon, and that an inferior dramatic instinct exercised upon Shakespeare may become more flexible than a superior one exercised upon Corneille and Racine. When it comes to ranting—ranting even in a modified and comparatively reasonable sense—we do, I suspect, quite as well as the French, if not rather better.) Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his entertaining little book upon "Actors and the Art of Acting," mentions M. Talbot, of the Français, as a surprisingly incompetent performer. My memory assents to his judgment at the same time that it proposes an amendment. This actor's special line is the buffeted, bemuddled, besotted old fathers, uncles, and guardians of classic comedy, and he plays them with his face much more than with his tongue. Nature has endowed him with a visage so admirably adapted, once for all, to his rôle, that he has only to sit in a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach, to look like a monument to bewildered senility. After that it doesn't matter what he says or how he says it.

The Comédie Française sometimes does weaker things than in keeping M. Talbot. Last autumn, for instance, it was really depressing to see Mlle. Dudley brought all the way from Brussels (and with not a little flourish either) to "create" the guilty vestal in "Rome Vaincue." As far as the interests of art are concerned, Mlle. Dudley had much better have remained in the Flemish capital, of whose language she is apparently a perfect mistress. It is hard, too, to forgive M. Perrin (M. Perrin is the present director of the Théâtre Français) for bringing out "L'Ami Fritz" of M. Erckmann-Chatrian. The two gentlemen who write under this name have a double claim to kindness. In the first place, they have produced some delightful little novels; every one knows and admires "Le Conscrit de 1813"; every one admires, indeed, the charming tale on which the play in question is founded. In the second place, they were, before the production of their piece, the objects of a scurrilous attack by the "Figaro" newspaper, which held the authors up to reprobation for having "insulted the army," and did its best to lay the train for a hostile manifestation on the first night. (It may be added that the good sense of the public outbalanced the impudence of the newspaper, and the play was simply advertised into success.) But neither the novels nor the persecutions of M. Erckmann-Chatrian avail to render "L'Ami Fritz," in its would-be dramatic form, worthy of the first French stage. It is played as well as possible, and upholstered even better; but it is, according to the vulgar phrase, too "thin" for the locality. Upholstery has never played such a part at the Théâtre Français as during the reign of M. Perrin, who came into power, if I mistake not, after the late war. He proved very early that he was a radical, and he has introduced a hundred novelties. His administration, however, has been brilliant, and in his hands the Théâtre Français has made money. This it had rarely done before, and this, in the conservative view, is quite beneath its dignity. To the conservative view I should humbly incline. An institution so closely protected by a rich and powerful State ought to be able to cultivate art for art.

The first of M. Sarcey's biographies, to which I have been too long in coming, is devoted to Regnier, a veteran actor, who left the stage four or five years since, and who now fills the office of oracle to his younger comrades. It is the indispensable thing, says M. Sarcey, for a young aspirant to be able to say that he has had lessons of M. Regnier, or that M. Regnier has advised him, or that he has talked such and such a point over with M. Regnier. (His comrades always speak of him as M. Regnier—never as simple Regnier.) I have had the fortune to see him but once; it was the first time I ever went to the Théâtre Français. He played Don Annibal in Emile Augier's romantic comedy of "L'Aventurière," and I have not forgotten the exquisite humor of the performance. The part is that of a sort of seventeenth century Captain Costigan, only the Miss Fotheringay in the case is the gentleman's sister, and not his daughter. This lady is moreover an ambitious and designing person, who leads her threadbare braggart of a brother quite by the nose. She has entrapped a worthy gentleman of Padua, of mature years, and he is on the eve of making her his wife, when his son, a clever young soldier, beguiles Don Annibal into supping with him, and makes him drink so deep that the prating adventurer at last lets the cat out of the bag, and confides to his companion that the fair Clorinda is not the virtuous gentlewoman she appears, but a poor strolling actress who has had a lover at every stage of her journey. The scene was played by Bressant and Regnier, and it has always remained in my mind as one of the most perfect things I have seen on the stage. The gradual action of the wine upon Don Annibal, the delicacy with which his deepening tipsiness was indicated, its intellectual rather than physical manifestation, and, in the midst of it, the fantastic conceit which made him think that he was winding his fellow drinker round his fingers—all this was exquisitely rendered. Drunkenness on the stage is usually both dreary and disgusting; and I can remember besides this but two really interesting pictures of intoxication (excepting always, indeed, the immortal tipsiness of Cassio in "Othello," which a clever actor can always make touching). One is the beautiful befuddlement of Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Joseph Jefferson renders it, and the other (a memory of the Théâtre Français) the scene in the "Duc Job," in which Got succumbs to mild inebriation, and dozes in his chair just boosily enough for the young girl who loves him to make it out.

It is to this admirable Emile Got that M. Sarcey's second notice is devoted. Got is at the present hour unquestionably the first actor at the Théâtre Français, and I have personally no hesitation in accepting him as the first of living actors. His younger comrade, Coquelin, has, I think, as much talent and as much art; but the older man Got has the longer and fuller record, and may therefore be spoken of as the master par excellence. If I were obliged to rank the half dozen premiers sujets of the last few years at the Théâtre Français in their absolute order of talent (thank Heaven, I am not so obliged!), I think I should make up some such little list as this: Got, Coquelin, Mme. Plessy, Sarah Bernhardt, Mlle. Favart, Delaunay. I confess that I have no sooner written it than I feel as if I ought to amend it, and wonder whether it is not a great folly to put Delaunay after Mlle. Favart. But this is idle.

As for Got, he is a singularly interesting actor. I have often wondered whether the best definition of him would not be to say that he is really a philosophic actor. He is an immense humorist, and his comicality is sometimes colossal; but his most striking quality is the one on which M. Sarcey dwells—his sobriety and profundity, his underlying element of manliness and melancholy, the impression he gives you of having a general conception of human life and of seeing the relativity, as one may say, of the character he represents. Of all the comic actors I have seen he is the least trivial—at the same time that for richness of detail his comicality is unsurpassed. His repertory is very large and various, but it may be divided into two equal halves—the parts that belong to reality and the parts that belong to fantasy. There is of course a vast deal of fantasy in his realistic parts and a vast deal of reality in his fantastic ones, but the general division is just; and at times, indeed, the two faces of his talent seem to have little in common. The Duc Job, to which I just now alluded, is one of the things he does most perfectly. The part, which is that of a young man, is a serious and tender one. It is amazing that the actor who plays it should also be able to carry off triumphantly the frantic buffoonery of Maître Pathelin, or should represent the Sganarelle of the "Médecin Malgré Lui" with such an unctuous breadth of humor. The two characters, perhaps, which have given me the liveliest idea of Got's power and fertility are the Maître Pathelin and the M. Poirier, who figures in the title to the comedy which Emile Augier and Jules Sandeau wrote together. M. Poirier, the retired shop-keeper who marries his daughter to a marquis and makes acquaintance with the incommodities incidental to such a piece of luck, is perhaps the actor's most elaborate creation; it is difficult to see how the portrayal of a type and an individual can have a larger sweep and a more minute completeness. The bonhomme Poirier, in Got's hands, is really great; and half a dozen of the actor's modern parts that I could mention are hardly less brilliant. But when I think of him I instinctively think first of some rôle in which he wears the cap and gown of the days in which humorous invention may fairly take the bit in its teeth. This is what Got lets it do in Maître Pathelin, and he leads the spectators' exhilarated fancy a dance to which their aching sides on the morrow sufficiently testify.

The piece is a réchauffé of a mediæval farce, which has the credit of being the first play not a "mystery" or a miracle piece in the records of the French drama. The plot is of the baldest and most primitive. It sets forth how a cunning lawyer undertook to purchase a dozen ells of cloth for nothing. In the first scene we see him in the market-place, bargaining and haggling with the draper, and then marching off with the roll of cloth, with the understanding that the shop-man is to call at his house in the course of an hour for the money. In the next act we have Maître Pathelin at his fireside with his wife, to whom he relates his trick and its projected sequel, and who greets them with Homeric laughter. He gets into bed, and the innocent draper arrives. Then follows a scene of which the liveliest description must be ineffective. Pathelin pretends to be out of his head, to be overtaken by a mysterious malady which has made him delirious, not to know the draper from Adam, never to have heard of the dozen ells of cloth, and to be altogether an impossible person to collect a debt from. To carry out this character he indulges in a series of indescribable antics, out-Bedlams Bedlam, frolics over the room dressed out in the bed-clothes and chanting the wildest gibberish, bewilders the poor draper to within an inch of his own sanity, and finally puts him utterly to rout. The spectacle could only be portentously flat or heroically successful, and in Got's hands this latter was its fortune. His Sganarelle, in the "Médecin Malgré Lui," and half a dozen of his characters from Molière besides—such a part, too, as his Tibia, in Alfred de Musset's charming bit of romanticism, the "Caprices de Marianne"—have a certain generic resemblance with his treatment of the figure I have sketched. In all of these the comicality is of the exuberant and tremendous order, and yet, in spite of its richness and flexibility, it suggests little connection with high animal spirits. It seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony. You cannot imagine Got representing a fool pure and simple—or at least a passive and unsuspecting fool. There must always be an element of shrewdness and even of contempt; he must be the man who knows and judges—or at least who pretends. It is a compliment, I take it, to an actor, to say that he prompts you to wonder about his private personality; and an observant spectator of M. Got is at liberty to guess that he is both obstinate and proud.

In Coquelin there is perhaps greater spontaneity, and there is a not inferior mastery of his art. He is a wonderfully brilliant, elastic actor. He is but thirty-five years old, and yet his record is most glorious. He too has his "actual" and his classical repertory, and here also it is hard to choose. As the young valet de comédie in Molière, Regnard, and Marivaux, he is incomparable. I shall never forget the really infernal brilliancy of his Mascarille in "L'Etourdi." His volubility, his rapidity, his impudence and gayety, his ringing, penetrating voice, and the shrill trumpet-note of his laughter, make him the ideal of the classic serving-man of the classic young lover—half rascal and half good fellow. Coquelin has lately had two or three immense successes in the comedies of the day. His Duc de Sept-Monts, in the famous "Etrangère" of Alexandre Dumas, last winter, was the capital creation of the piece; and in the revival, this winter, of Augier's "Paul Forestier," his Adolphe de Beaubourg, the young man about town, consciously tainted with commonness, and trying to shake off the incubus, seemed, while one watched it and listened to it, the last word of delicately humorous art. Of Coquelin's eminence in the old comedies M. Sarcey speaks with a certain picturesque force: "No one is better cut out to represent those bold and magnificent rascals of the old repertory, with their boisterous gayety, their brilliant fancy, and their superb extravagance, who give to their buffoonery je ne sais quoi d'épique. In these parts one may say of Coquelin that he is incomparable. I prefer him to Got in such cases, and even to Regnier, his master. I never saw Monrose, and cannot speak of him. But good judges have assured me that there was much that was factitious in the manner of this eminent comedian, and that his vivacity was a trifle mechanical. There is nothing whatever of this in Coquelin's manner. The eye, the nose, and the voice—the voice above all—are his most powerful means of action. He launches his tirades all in one breath, with full lungs, without bothering too much over the shading of details, in large masses, and he possesses himself only the more strongly of the public, which has a great sense of ensemble. The words that must be detached, the words that must decisively 'tell,' glitter in this delivery with the sonorous ring of a brand-new louis d'or. Crispin, Scapin, Figaro, Mascarille have never found a more valiant and joyous interpreter."

I should say that this was enough about the men at the Théâtre Français, if I did not remember that I have not spoken of Delaunay. But Delaunay has plenty of people to speak for him; he has, in especial, the more eloquent half of humanity—the ladies. I suppose that of all the actors of the Comédie Français he is the most universally appreciated and admired; he is the popular favorite. And he has certainly earned this distinction, for there was never a more amiable and sympathetic genius. He plays the young lovers of the past and the present, and he acquits himself of his difficult and delicate task with extraordinary grace and propriety. The danger I spoke of a while since—the danger, for the actor of a romantic and sentimental part, of being compromised by the coat and trousers, the hat and umbrella of the current year—are reduced by Delaunay to their minimum. He reconciles in a marvellous fashion the love-sick gallant of the ideal world with the "gentlemanly man" of to-day; and his passion is as far removed from rant as his propriety is from stiffness. He has been accused of late years of falling into a mannerism, and I think there is some truth in the charge. But the fault in Delaunay's situation is certainly venial. How can a man of fifty, to whom, as regards face and figure, Nature has been stingy, play an amorous swain of twenty without taking refuge in a mannerism? His mannerism is a legitimate device for diverting the spectator's attention from certain incongruities. Delaunay's juvenility, his ardor, his passion, his good taste and sense of fitness, have always an irresistible charm. As he has grown older he has increased his repertory by parts of greater weight and sobriety—he has played the husbands as well as the lovers. One of his most recent and brilliant "creations" of this kind is his Marquis de Presles in "Le Gendre de M. Poirier"—a piece of acting superb for its lightness and désinvolture. It cannot be better praised than by saying it was worthy of Got's inimitable rendering of the part opposed to it. But I think I shall remember Delaunay best in the picturesque and romantic comedies—as the Duc de Richelieu in "Mlle. De Belle-Isle"; as the joyous, gallant, exuberant young hero, his plumes and love knots fluttering in the breath of his gushing improvisation, of Corneille's "Menteur"; or, most of all, as the melodious swains of those charmingly poetic, faintly, naturally Shakespearian little comedies of Alfred de Musset.

To speak of Delaunay ought to bring us properly to Mlle. Favart, who for so many years invariably represented the object of his tender invocations. Mlle. Favart at the present time rather lacks what the French call "actuality." She has made this winter an attempt to recover something of that large measure of it which she once possessed; but I doubt whether it has been completely successful. M. Sarcey has not yet put forth his notice of her; and when he does so it will be interesting to see how he treats her. She is not one of his high admirations. She is a great talent which has passed into eclipse. I call her a great talent, although I remember the words in which M. Sarcey somewhere speaks of her: "Mlle. Favart, who, to happy natural gifts, soutenu par un travail acharné, owed a distinguished place," etc. Her talent is great, but the impression that she gives of a travail acharné and of an insatiable ambition is perhaps even greater. For many years she reigned supreme, and I believe she is accused of not having always reigned generously. However that may be, there came a day when Mlles. Croizette and Sarah Bernhardt passed to the front, and the elder actress receded, if not into the background, at least into what painters call the middle distance. The private history of these events has, I believe, been rich in heart-burnings; but it is only with the public history that we are concerned. Mlle. Favart has always seemed to be a powerful rather than an interesting actress; there is usually something mechanical and overdone in her manner. In some of her parts there is a kind of audible creaking of the machinery. If Delaunay is open to the reproach of having let a mannerism get the better of him, this accusation is much more fatally true of Mlle. Favart. On the other hand, she knows her trade as no one does—no one, at least, save Mme. Plessy. When she is bad she is extremely bad, and sometimes she is interruptedly bad for a whole evening. In the revival of Scribe's clever comedy of "Une Chaine," this winter (which, by the way, though the cast included both Got and Coquelin, was the nearest approach to mediocrity I have ever seen at the Théâtre Français), Mlle. Favart was, to my sense, startlingly bad. The part had originally been played by Mme. Plessy; and I remember how M. Sarcey in his feuilleton treated its actual representative. "Mlle. Favart does Louise. Who does not recall the exquisite delicacy and temperance with which Mme. Plessy rendered that difficult scene in the second act?" etc. And nothing more. When, however, Mlle. Favart is at her best, she is prodigiously strong. She rises to great occasions. I doubt whether such parts as the desperate heroine of the "Supplice d'une Femme," or as Julie in Octave Feuillet's lugubrious drama of that name, could be more effectively played than she plays them. She can carry a great weight without flinching; she has what the French call her "authority"; and in declamation she sometimes unrolls her fine voice, as it were, in long harmonious waves and cadences, the sustained power of which her younger rivals must often envy her.

I am drawing to the close of these rather desultory observations without having spoken of the four ladies commemorated by M. Sarcey in the publication which lies before me; and I do not know that I can justify my tardiness otherwise than by saying that writing and reading about artists of so extreme a personal brilliancy is poor work, and that the best the critic can do is to wish his reader may see them, from a quiet fauteuil, as speedily and as often as possible. Of Madeleine Brohan, indeed, there is little to say. She is a delightful person to listen to, and she is still delightful to look at in spite of that redundancy of contour which time has contributed to her charm. But she has never been ambitious, and her talent has had no particularly original quality. It is a long time since she created an important part; but in the old repertory her rich, dense voice, her charming smile, her mellow, tranquil gayety, always give extreme pleasure. To hear her sit and talk, simply, and laugh and play with her fan, along with Mme. Plessy, in Molière's "Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes," is an entertainment to be remembered. For Mme. Plessy I should have to mend my pen and begin a new chapter; and for Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt no less a ceremony would suffice. I saw Mme. Plessy for the first time in Emile Augier's "Aventurière," when, as I mentioned, I first saw Regnier. This is considered by many persons her best part, and she certainly carries it off with a high hand; but I like her better in characters which afford more scope to her talents for comedy. These characters are very numerous, for her activity and versatility have been extraordinary. Her comedy of course is "high"; it is of the highest conceivable kind, and she has often been accused of being too mincing and too artificial. I should never make this charge, for, to me, Mme. Plessy's minauderies, her grand airs and her arch-refinements, have never been anything but the odorous swayings and queenly tossings of some splendid garden flower. Never had an actress grander manners. When Mme. Plessy represents a duchess, you have to make no allowance. Her limitations are on the side of the pathetic. If she is brilliant, she is cold; and I cannot imagine her touching the source of tears. But she is in the highest degree accomplished; she gives an impression of intelligence and intellect which is produced by none of her companions—excepting always the extremely exceptional Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Plessy's intellect has sometimes misled her—as, for instance, when it whispered to her, a few years since, that she could play Agrippine in Racine's "Britannicus," when that tragedy was presented for the débuts of Mounet-Sully. I was verdant enough to think her Agrippine very fine; but M. Sarcey reminds his readers of what he said of it the Monday after the first performance. "I will not say"—he quotes himself—"that Mme. Plessy is indifferent. With her intelligence, her natural gifts, her great situation, her immense authority over the public, one cannot be indifferent in anything. She is therefore not indifferently bad. She is bad to a point which cannot be expressed, and which would be afflicting for dramatic art if it were not that in this great shipwreck there rise to the surface a few floating fragments of the finest qualities that nature has ever bestowed upon an artist."

Mme. Plessy retired from the stage six months ago, and it may be said that the void produced by this event is irreparable. There is not only no prospect, but there is no hope of filling it up. The present conditions of artistic production are directly hostile to the formation of actresses as consummate and as complete as Mme. Plessy. One may not expect to see her like, any more than one may expect to see a new manufacture of old lace and old brocade. She carried off with her something that the younger generation of actresses will consistently lack—a certain largeness of style and robustness of art. (These qualities are in a modified degree those of Mlle. Favart.) But if the younger actresses have the success of Mlles. Croizette and Sarah Bernhardt, will they greatly care whether they are not "robust"? These young ladies are children of a later and eminently contemporary type, according to which an actress undertakes not to interest, but to fascinate. They are charming—"awfully" charming; strange, eccentric, and imaginative. It would be needless to speak specifically of Mlle. Croizette; for although she has very great attractions, I think she may (by the cold impartiality of science) be classified as a secondary, a less inspired, and (to use the great word of the day) a more "brutal" Sarah Bernhardt. (Mlle. Croizette's "brutality" is her great card.) As for Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, she is simply, at present, in Paris, one of the great figures of the day. It is hard to imagine a more brilliant embodiment of feminine success. It is hard to imagine a young woman leading a more complete and multifold existence. The intellectual fermentation of a productive, creative (and most ambitious) artist, the splendors of a princess, the glories of a celebrity, and various other matters besides—these are a sufficiently interesting combination. But as an artist, as I have said, Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt would almost deserve a chapter for herself.

Henry James, Jr.

MISS MISANTHROPE.

By Justin McCarthy.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE BRIDGE.

There was one walk of which Minola Grey was especially fond, and which she loved to enjoy alone. It led by a particular track through Regent's Park, avoiding for the most part the frequented paths, and bringing her at one time to the summit of a little mound or knoll, from which she could look across broad fields where sheep were grazing, and through clumps of trees and over hedges, and from which, by a happy peculiarity, all sight of the beaten and dusty avenues of the park was shut out. The view from this little eminence was perhaps most beautiful on a moist and misty day. There the soft, loving, artistic breath of the rain-charged clouds breathed tenderly on the landscape, and effaced any of the harsher, or meaner, or in any way more prosaic details. There the gazer only saw a noble expanse of delicious green grass and darker hedgerows, and trees of dun and gray, and softly-mottled moss-grown trunks, and here and there a bed of flowers, and all under a silver-gray atmosphere that almost seemed to dissolve while the eye rested on it. When Minola had looked long enough on the scene opening below the mound, she then usually pursued her course by devious ways until she reached one of the bridges of the canal, and there she made another halting place. The scene from the canal-bridge, unlike that from the mound, looked best on a bright, breezy day, of quick changing lights and shadows. There the brown water of the canal sparkled and gladdened in the sun, and Minola, leaning over the little bridge, and fixing her eyes on the water as it rippled past the nearer bank, might enjoy, for the hour, the full sensation of one who floats in a boat along a stream, and watches the trees and grasses of the shore. The place was quiet enough, and rich enough in trees and shrubs, and little reeds quivering out of the water, to seem, at least in Minola's pleased eyes, like a spot on the bank of the canal far in the country, while yet there was to her the peculiar and keen delight of knowing herself in London. Sometimes, too, a canal boat came gliding along, steered by a stalwart and sunburnt woman in a great straw bonnet, and the boat and the woman brought wild and delicious ideas of far-off country places, with woods and gipsies, and fresh, half savage, half poetic life. Minola extracted beautiful pictures and much poetry and romance from that little bridge over the discolored canal, creeping through the heart of London.

The population of London—even its idlers—usually move along in tracks and grooves. Where some go, others go; where few go, at last none go. It is wonderful what hours of almost absolute solitude Minola was able to enjoy in the midst of Regent's Park. Voices, indeed, constantly reached her: the cries and laughter of children, the shoutings of cricketers, the dulled clamor of the metropolis itself. These reached her as did the bleating of sheep and the tinkle of their bells, the barking of dogs, and occasionally the fierce, hoarse, thrilling growl or roar of some disturbed or impatient animal in the Zoölogical Gardens near at hand. But many and many a time Minola lounged for half an hour on her little knoll or on her chosen bridge, without seeing more of man or woman than of the lions in their cages on the other side of the enclosure. There was a particular hour of the day, too, when the park in general was especially deserted, and it appears almost needless to say that this was the time selected usually by Miss Grey for her rambles. It was sometimes a curious, half sensuous pleasure for her thus alone, amid the murmur of the trees, to fancy herself, for the moment, back again within sight of the mausoleum at Keeton, where she had spent so many weary and solitary hours, and then, awaking, to rejoice anew in her freedom and in London.

It was a fortunate and kindly destiny which assigned to our heroine a poetess for a companion. Much as she loved occasional solitude, Minola loved still better the spirit of fidelity to the obligations of true camaraderie, and if Miss Blanchet had had any manner of work to do, from the mending of a stocking to the teaching of a school, in which Minola could possibly have assisted her, Minola would never have thought of leaving her to do the work alone. Or even if Miss Blanchet had work to do in which Minola could not have helped her, but to which her presence would be any manner of encouragement, Minola would have stayed with her, and never dreamed of play while her companion had to be at work. But we may safely appeal to all the poets of all time to say whether anybody ever desired companionship while engaged in the composition of poetry. Sappho herself could have well dispensed with the society of Phaon at such a moment. It is true that Corinne threw off some of her grandest effusions in full face of an admiring crowd, and recited them not only with Lord Nelvil, but at him. Corinne, however, was of the improvisatrice class, to which Mary Blanchet did not profess to belong; and we own, moreover, to a constant suspicion that Corinne must have sat up late for many previous nights getting her improvisations by heart. At all events Miss Blanchet was not Corinne, and required seclusion, and much thought, and comparison of rhymes, and even looking out in dictionaries, in order to the composition of her poems. At the present time Minola was well aware that her friend had a new collection of poems on hand, and that the poems would be churned off with less difficulty if the author were occasionally left to herself for an hour or two. Therefore Minola was free to go into Regent's Park, with untroubled conscience and light heart. The woman who was not a poet revelled in the rustling branches and the sight of the soft grass, and was filled with glad visions and dreams by the flowing even of a poor, clouded, slow canal stream, and was rapt into the ideal at the sight of a reed growing in the water and shaken by the wind. The poetess remained at home in a dull room, and hammered out rhymes with the help of a dictionary.

But, to do Minola justice, she was not wholly given up, even in these free and lonely hours, to the sweet, innocent sensuousness that fills certain beings when amid trees and the sounds of flowing water. She had many scruples about the possible selfishness of her life, and wondered whether it was not wrong thus to live, and whether it was not through some fault of hers that no opportunity presented itself to her of doing any good for man or woman. She asked herself sometimes whether she had not been impatient and wilful in her dealings with the people at home. She still, when in a self-questioning and penitential mood, thought and spoke of Keeton as "home," and whether she had not done wrong in leaving the material enclosure of any place bearing even by tradition the name of home, for a life of freedom which some censors might have thought unwomanly. There are metaphysicians who hold that, although man of his nature has no intuitive knowledge, yet that the accumulated experience of generations supplies gradually for men, as they are born, a something which is like intuition to start with, and which they could not now start clear of. So the experience or the traditions of generations form a sort of factitious and accumulated conscience for women independent of any abstract or eternal laws, and amounting in strength to something like intuition. Over this shadow they cannot leap. Minola, filled as she was with a peculiarly independent spirit, and driven by circumstances to consider its indulgence a right and even a duty, could not keep from the occasional torment of a doubt whether there must not be something wrong in the conduct of any woman who, under any circumstances, leaves voluntarily, and while she is yet under age, the home of her childhood, and takes up her abode among strangers, without guardians, mistress of herself, and in lodgings.

Perhaps some such ideas were in Minola's mind when she left Mary Blanchet, a few mornings after the meetings described in the last chapter, and set out for a pleasant lonely walk in Regent's Park. Perhaps it was the very pleasure of the walk, and the loneliness, now missed for some days, that made her dread being selfish, and sent her down into a drooping and penitent reaction. "This will never do," she kept thinking. "I ought to try to do something for somebody. I am growing to think only of myself—and I broke away from Keeton because I was getting morbid in thinking about myself."

It was in this remorseful condition of mind that she approached her favorite mound, longing for an hour of quiet delight there, and half ashamed of her longing. When she had nearly reached its height, she discerned that the fates had seemingly resolved to punish her for her love of solitariness, by decreeing that her chosen retreat should that day be occupied. There was a seat on which she usually sat, and now a man was there. That was bad enough, but she could in an ordinary case have passed on, and sought some other place. Now, however, she saw that that was denied to her; for the intruder was Mr. Victor Heron, and at the sound of her footstep he looked round, recognized her, and was already coming toward her, with hat uplifted and courteous bow.

The very rapid moment of time between Minola's first seeing Mr. Heron and his recognizing her had enabled her quick eyes to perceive that when he thought himself alone he was anything but the genial and joyous personage he appeared in company. At first Miss Grey's attention was withdrawn from her own disappointment by the air of melancholy and even of utter despondency about the face and figure of the seated man. He sat leaning forward, his chin supported by one hand, his eyes fixed moodily on the ground. He seemed to have no manner of concern with air, or sky, or scene, and his dark-complexioned face gave the impression of one terribly at odds with fortune. Minola felt almost irresistibly drawn toward one who seemed unhappy. Her harmless misanthropy went out at a breath in the presence of any man who appeared to suffer.

But the change which came over Mr. Heron when he saw her can only be likened to that which would be made by the sudden illumination of a house that a second before was all dark, and seemingly tenantless. He came to meet her with sparkling eyes and delighted expression. Mr. Heron, it should perhaps be explained, considered himself so much older than Miss Grey, so entirely an experienced, mature, not to say outworn man, that he did not think of waiting to see whether Miss Grey was inclined to encourage a renewal of the acquaintance. He considered it his duty to be polite and friendly to the pretty girl he had met at Money's, and whom he assumed to be poor, and wanting in friends.

"How fortunate I am to meet you here to-day!" he said. "You remember me, I hope, Miss Grey? I haven't called you Miss Money this time. Come now—don't say you have forgotten me."

"I could not say I had forgotten you, for it would not be true, Mr. Heron."

"Thank you; that was very prettily said, and kindly."

"Was it? I really didn't mean it to be either pretty or kind—only the truth."

"I see, you go in for being downright, and saying only what you mean. I am very glad. So do I, and I am very much delighted to meet you here, Miss Grey. Come, you won't say as much for me?"

"I cannot say that I was glad to see anybody just here; this place is always deserted, except by me."

"You come here often, and you are sorry to have your retreat broken in upon? Don't hesitate to say so, Miss Grey, and I will promise not to come into this part of the park—or into any part of the park for that matter—any more. Why should I disturb you?"

He spoke with such earnestness and such evident sincerity that Minola began to feel ashamed of her previous ungraciousness.

"That would be rather hard upon you, and a little arrogant on my part," she said smiling. "The park isn't mine, and, if it were, I am sure I could not be selfish enough to wish to shut you out from any part of it. But I am in the habit of being a good deal alone; and I fear it makes me a little rude and selfish sometimes. I was thinking of that just as I came up here, and saw you."

"Then you saw me before I saw you?"

"Oh, yes."

"I am afraid you must have seen a very woe-begone personage."

"Yes; you seemed unhappy, I thought."

"There is something sympathetic about you, Miss Grey, for all your coldness and loneliness."

"Surely," said Miss Grey, "a woman without some feeling of sympathy would be hardly fit to live."

"You think so?" he asked quite earnestly and gravely. "So do I—so do I indeed. Men have little time to sympathize with men—they are all too busy with their own affairs. What should we do but for the sympathy of women? Now tell me, why do you smile at that? I saw that you were trying not to laugh."

"I could not help smiling a little, it was so thoroughly masculine a sentiment."

"Was it? How is that now?" His direct way of propounding his questions rather amused and did not displease her. It was like the way of a rational man talking with another rational being—a style of conversation which has much attraction for some women.

"Well, because it looked upon women so honestly as creatures only formed to make men comfortable, by coming up and sympathizing with them when they are in a humor for sympathy, and then retiring out of the way into their corner again."

"I can assure you, Miss Grey, that never has been my idea—nothing of the kind, indeed. To tell the truth, I have not known much about the sympathy of women and all that. I have lived awfully out of the world, and I never had any sisters, and I hardly remember my mother. I know women chiefly in poems and romances, and I believe I generally adopt the goddess theory. In honest truth, most women do seem to me a sort of goddesses."

"You will not be long in England without unlearning that theory," Miss Grey said. "Our writers seem to have hardly any subject now but the faults and follies of women. One might sometimes think that woman was a newly-discovered creature that the world could never be done wondering at."

"Yes, yes; I read a good deal of that sort of thing out in the colonies. But I have retained the goddess theory, so far at least. Mrs. Money seems to me a sort of divinity. Miss Money is a born saint; she ought to go about with a gilt plate round her head. Miss Lucy Money seems like a little angel of light. Are you smiling again? I do assure you these are my real feelings."

"I was not smiling at the idea, but only at the difference between it and the favorite ideas of most people at present, even of women about women."

"May I walk a little with you," Mr. Heron said, "or will you sit and rest here, if you are tired, and we will talk? Don't stand on formality and send me away, although I will go if you like, and not feel in the least offended. But if we might talk for a little, it would give me great pleasure. You said just now that you did not wish to be selfish. It will be very unselfish and very kind if you will let me talk to you a little. I felt very wretched when you came up—quite in a suicidal frame of mind."

"Oh, no! Pray don't speak in that way. You do not mean it I am sure."

"In one sense I do mean it—that is, it is quite true that I should not have thrown myself into the water or blown my brains out; that sort of thing seems to me like abandoning one's post without orders from headquarters. But I felt in the condition of mind when one can quite understand how such things are done, and would be glad if he were free to follow the example. For me that is a great change in itself," the young man added with some bitterness.

"What can I do for him?" Miss Grey asked herself mentally. "Nothing but to show him the view from the canal bridge. There is nothing else in my power."

"There is a very pretty view a short distance from this," she said; "a view from a bridge, and I am particularly fond of looking from bridges. Should you like to walk there?"

"I should like to walk anywhere with you," Victor Heron said, with a look of genuine gratefulness, which had not the faintest breath of compliment in it, and could only be accepted as frank truth.

Perhaps, if Miss Grey had been a town-bred girl, she might have hesitated about setting out for a companionable walk in the park with a young man who was almost a stranger to her. But, as it was, she appeared to herself to have all the right of free action belonging to one in a place of which the public opinion can in no wise touch her. She acted in London as freely as one speaks with a friend in a foreign hotel room, where he knows that the company around are unable to understand what he is saying. In this particular instance, however, Minola hardly thought about the matter at all. There was something in Heron's open and emotional way which made people almost at the first meeting cease to regard him as a stranger. Perhaps, if Minola had thought over the matter, she might have cited in vindication of her course the valuable authority of Major Pendennis, who, when asked whether Laura might properly take walks in the Temple Gardens with Warrington, eagerly said, "Yes, yes, begad, of course, you go out with him. It's like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody in the Gardens; and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of thing. Everybody walks in the Temple Gardens." Regent's Park, one would think, ought to come under the same laws. There are beadles there, too, or guardian functionaries of some sort, although it may be owned that in their walk to and from the canal bridge Heron and Minola encountered none of them.

It is doubtful whether Heron at least would have noticed such a personage even had they come in their way, for he talked nearly all the time, except when he paused for an answer to some direct question, and he seldom took his eyes from Minola's face. He was not staring at her, or broadly admiring her; nor, indeed, was there anything in his manner to make it certain that he was admiring her at all, as man conventionally is understood to admire woman. But he had evidently put Miss Grey into the place of a sympathetic and trusted friend, and he talked to her accordingly. She was amused and interested, and she now and then kept making little disparaging criticisms to herself, in order to sustain her place as the cool depreciator of man. But she was very happy for all that.

One characteristic peculiarity of this sudden and singular acquaintanceship ought to be mentioned. When people still read "Gil Blas" they would have remembered at once how the waiting-woman received delightedly the advances of Gil Blas, believing him to be a gentleman of fortune, and how Gil Blas paid great court to the waiting-woman, believing her to be a lady of rank. The pair of friends in Regent's Park were drawn together by exactly opposite impulses: each believed the other poor and unfriended. Minola was under the impression that she was giving her sympathy to a ruined and unhappy young man, who had failed in life almost at the very beginning, and was now friendless in stony-hearted London. Victor Heron was convinced that his companion was a poor orphan girl, who had been sent down by misfortune from a position of comfort, or even wealth, to earn her bread by some sort of intellectual labor, while she lived in a small back room in a depressed and mournful quarter of London.

He told her the story of his grievance; it may be that he even told her some parts of it more than once. It was a strange sensation to her, as she walked on the soft green turf, in the silver gray atmosphere, to hear this young man, who seemed to have lived so bold and strange a life, appealing to her for an opinion as to the course he ought to pursue to have his cause set right. The St. Xavier's Settlements do not geographically count for much, and politically they count for still less. But when Mr. Heron told of his having been administrator and commandant there; of his having made treaties with neighboring kings (she knew they were only black kings); of his having tried to put down slavery, and to maintain what he persisted in believing to be the true honor of England; of war made on him, and war made by him in return—while she listened to all this, it is no wonder if our romantic girl from Duke's Keeton sometimes thought she was conversing with one of the heroes and master-spirits of the time. He made the whole story very clear to her, and she thoroughly understood it, although her imagination and her senses were sometimes disturbed by the tropic glare which seemed to come over the places and events he described. At last they actually came to be standing on the canal bridge, and neither looked at the view they had come to see.

"Now what do you advise?" Heron said, after having several times impressed some particular point on her. "I attach great importance to a woman's advice. You have instincts, and all that, which we haven't; at least so everybody says. Would you let this thing drop altogether, and try some other career, or would you fight it out?"

"I would fight it out," Minola said, looking up to him with sparkling eyes, "and I would never let it drop. I would make them do me justice."

"Just what I think; just what I came to England resolved to do. I hate the idea of giving in; but people here discourage me. Money discourages me. He says the Government will never do anything unless I make myself troublesome."

"Well, then, why not make yourself troublesome?"

"I have made myself troublesome in one sense," he said, with a vexed kind of laugh, "by haunting ante-chambers, and trying to force people to see me who don't want to see me. But I can't do any more of that kind of work; I am sick of it. I am ashamed of having tried it at all."

"Yes, I couldn't do that," Minola said gravely.

"Then," Heron said, with a little embarrassment, "a man—a very kind and well-meaning fellow, an old friend of my father's—offered to introduce me to Lady Chertsey—a very clever woman, a queen of society, I am told, who gets all the world (of politics, I mean) into her drawing-room, and delights in being a sort of power, and all that. She could push a fellow, they say, wonderfully if she took any interest in him. But I couldn't do that, you know."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, I shouldn't care to be introduced to a lady's drawing-room with the secret purpose of trying to get her to do me a service. There seems something mean in that. Besides, I have a cause (at least, I think I have) which is too good to be served in that kind of way. If I can't get a hearing and justice from the Government of England and the people of England for the sake of right and for the claims I have, I will never try to get it through. Oh, well, perhaps, I ought not to say what I was going to say."

"Why not?" Minola asked again.

"I mean, perhaps I ought not to say it to you."

"I don't know really. Tell me what it is, and then I'll tell you whether you ought to say it."

He laughed. "Well, I was only going to say that I don't care to have my cause served by petticoat influence."

"I think you are quite right. If I were a man, I should think petticoat influence in such a matter contemptible. But why should you not like to say so?"

"Only because I was afraid you might think I meant to speak contemptuously of the influence and the advice of women. I don't mean anything of the kind. I have the highest opinion of the advice of women and their influence, as I have told you already; but I couldn't endure the idea of having a lady, who doesn't know or care anything about me and my claims, asked by somebody to say a word to some great man or some great man's wife, in order that I might get a hearing. I am sure you understand what I mean, Miss Grey."

"Oh, yes, I never should have misunderstood it; and I know that you are quite right. It would be a downright degradation."

"So I felt. Anyhow, I could not do it. Then there remains the making myself troublesome, as Money advises——"

"Yes, what is that?"

"Getting my case brought on again and again in the House of Commons, and having debates about it, and making the whole thing public, and so forcing the Government either to do me justice or to satisfy the country that justice has already been done," he said bitterly.

"That would seem to me a right thing to do," Miss Grey said; "but I know so little that I ought not to offer a word of advice."

"Oh, yes, I should trust to your feelings and instincts in such a case. Well, I don't like, somehow, being in the hands of politicians and party men, who might use me and my cause only as a means of annoying the Government—not really from any sense of right and justice. I don't know if I make myself quite understood; it is hard to expect a lady, especially a young lady, to understand these things."

"I think I can quite understand all that. We are not so stupid as you seem to suppose, Mr. Heron."

"Stupid? Didn't I tell you of my goddess theory?"

"Some of the goddesses were very stupid I always think. Venus was stupid."

"Well, well; anyhow you are not Venus."

"No, indeed."

"In that sense I mean. Then I do succeed in making myself understood?"

"Oh, yes!" She could see that he was looking disappointed at her interruption and her seeming levity, which was indeed only the result of a momentary impulse to keep up to herself her character as a scorner of men. "I think I understand quite clearly that you fear to be made the mere instrument of politicians; and I think you are quite right. I did not think of that at first, but, now that you explain it, I am sure that you are right."

He nodded approvingly. "Then comes the question," he said, "what is to be done?"

Leaning against the bridge, he thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood looking into her face, as if he were really waiting for her to solve the problem for him.

"That is entirely beyond me," she said. "I know nothing; I could not even guess at what ought to be done."

"No? Now here is my idea. Why not plead my cause myself?"

"Plead your cause yourself? Can that be done?"

"Yes; myself—in Parliament."

Minola's mind at once formed and framed a picture of a stately assembly, like a Roman Senate, or like the group of King Agrippa, Festus, Bernice, and the rest, and Mr. Heron pleading his cause like Cicero or Paul. The thing seemed hardly congruous. It did not seem to her to fall in with modern conditions at all. Her face became blank; she did not well know what to answer.

"Are people allowed to do such things now, in England?" she asked—"to plead causes before Parliament?"

An odd idea came up in her mind, that perhaps by the time this strange performance came to be enacted, Mr. Augustus Sheppard might be in Parliament, and Mr. Heron's enthusiastic eloquence would have to be addressed to him. She did not like the idea.

"You don't understand," Heron said. "You really don't this time. What I mean is to get into Parliament—be elected for some place, and then stand up and make my own fight for myself."

She kindled at the idea.

"Oh, yes, of course! How stupid I am not to see at once! That is a splendid idea; the very thing I should like to do if I were a man and in your place."

"You really think so?"

"Indeed I do. But then——" And she hesitated, for she feared that she had been only encouraging him to a wild dream. "Does it not cost a great deal of money to get into Parliament?"

"No; I think not; not always at least. I should look out for an opportunity. I have money enough—for me. I'm not a rich man, Miss Grey, but my father left me well enough off, as far as that goes; and you know that in a place like St. Xavier's one couldn't spend any money. There was no way of getting rid of it. No, my troubles are none of them money troubles. I only want to vindicate my past career, and so to have a career for the future. I ought to be doing something. I feel in an unhealthy state of mind while all this is pressing on me. You understand?"

"I can understand it," Miss Grey said, turning to leave the bridge, and bestowing one glance at the yellow, slow-moving water, and the reeds and the bushes, of which she and her companion had not spoken a word. "It is not good to have to think of oneself. But you are bound to vindicate yourself; that I am sure is your duty. Then you can think of other things—of the public and the country."

"He is rich," she thought, "and he is clever and earnest, in spite of his egotism. Of course he will have a career, and be successful. I thought that he was poor and broken down, and that I was doing him a kindness by showing sympathy with him."

They went away together, and Heron, delighted with her encouragement and her intelligence, unfolded splendid plans of what he was to do. But Minola somehow entered less cordially into them than she had done before, and Mr. Heron at last became ashamed of talking so much about himself.

"I hope we shall meet again," he said as she stopped significantly at one of the gates leading out of the park, to intimate that now their roads were separating. "I wish you would allow me to call and see you. I do hope you won't think me odd, or that I am presuming on your kindness. I am a semi-barbarian, you know—have been so long out of civilization—and I haven't any idea of the ways of the polite world."

"Nor I," said Minola. "I have come from utter barbarism—from a country town."

"But I do hope we shall meet again, for you are so sympathetic and kind."

She bade him good day, and nodded with a friendly smile, but made no answer to the repeated expression of his hope, and she hastened away.

Heron could not endure walking alone just then. He hailed a hansom and disappeared.

"How vain men are!" Minola thought as she went her way. "How egotistical they all are!" Of course she assumed herself to have obtained a complete knowledge of all the characters of men. "How egotistic he is! Of course he tells his whole story to every woman he meets. Lucy Money no doubt has it by heart."

She did not remember for the moment that her own favorite hero was likewise somewhat egotistical and effusive, and that he was very apt to pour out the story of his wrongs into the ear of any sympathetic woman. But she was disappointed with herself and her friend just now, and was not in a mood to make perfectly reasonable comparisons.

CHAPTER VIII.

A "HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN."

Mrs. Money had one great object in life. At least, if it was not an object defined and set out before her, it was an instinct: it was to make people happy. She could not rest without trying to make people happy. The motherly instinct, which in other women is satisfied by rushing at babies wherever they are to be seen, and ministering to them, and fondling them, and talking pigeon-English to them, exuberated in her so far as to set her trying to do the mother's part for all men and women who came within her range, even when their years far exceeded hers. There was one great advantage to herself personally in this: it kept her content in what had come to be her own sphere. One cannot go meddling in the affairs of duchesses and countesses, and Ministers of State, with whatever kindly desire of setting everything to rights and making them all happy. People of that class give themselves such haughty airs that they would rather remain unhappy in their own way than obtain felicity at the hand of some person of inferior station. So Mrs. Money believed; and perhaps one secret cause of her dislike to the aristocracy (along with the avowed conviction that the aristocratic system had somehow misprized and interfered with her husband) was the feeling that if she were among them, they would not allow her to do anything for them. She therefore maintained a circle of which she herself was the queen, and patroness, and Lady Bountiful. She busied herself about everybody's affairs, and was kind to everybody, without any feeling of delight in the mere work of patronizing, but out of a sheer pleasure in trying to make people happy. Naturally she made mistakes, and the general system of her social circle worked so as to occasion a continual change, a passing away of old friends and coming in of new. As young men rose in the world and became independent, as girls got married and came to consider themselves supreme in their own sphere, they tended to move away from Mrs. Money's influence. Even the grateful and the generous could not always avoid this. For beginners in any path of life she was the specially appointed helper and friend; and next to these she might be called the patron saint of failures. In her circle were young poets, painters, lawyers, novelists, preachers, ambitious men looking out for seats in Parliament, or beginners in Parliament; also there were the gray old poets whom no one read; the painters who could not get their pictures exhibited or bought; the men who were in Parliament ten or twenty years ago, and got out and never could get in again; and the inventors who could not impress any government or capitalist with a sense of the value of their discoveries. No front-rank, successful person of any kind was usually to be found in Mrs. Money's rooms. Her guests were the youths who were putting their armor on for the battle, and the worn-out campaigners who had put it off defeated.

Naturally, when Minola Grey came in Mrs. Money's way, the sympathy and interest of the kindly lady were quickened to their keenest. This beautiful, motherless, fatherless, proud, lonely girl—not so old as her own Theresa, not older than her own Lucy—living by herself, or almost by herself, in gloomy lodgings in the heart of London—how could she fail to be an object of Mrs. Money's deep concern? Of course Mrs. Money must look into all her affairs, and find out whether she was poor; and in what sort of way she was living; and whether the people with whom she lodged were kind to her.

Mary Blanchet's pride of heart can hardly be described when an open carriage, with a pair of splendid grays, stopped at the door of the house in the no-thoroughfare street, and a footman got down and knocked; and it finally appeared that Mrs. Money, Miss Money, and Miss Lucy Money had called to see Miss Grey. Miss Grey, as it happened, was not at home, although the servant at first supposed that she was; and thus the three ladies were shown into Minola's sitting-room, and there almost instantly captured by Miss Blanchet. We say "almost" because there was an interval long enough for Lucy to dart about the room from point to point, taking up a book here, a piece of music there, an engraving, a photograph, or a flower, and pronouncing everything delightful. The room was old-fashioned, spacious, and solid, very unlike the tiny apartments of the ordinary West End lodging; and, what with the flowers and the books, it really looked rather an attractive place to enthusiastic eyes. Miss Money kept her eyes on the ground for the most part, and professed to take little notice of the ordinary adornments of rooms; for Miss Money was a saint, and was furthermore engaged to a man not far from her father's years, who, having made a great deal of money at the Parliamentary bar, was now thinking of entering the Church, and had already set about the building of a temple of mediæval style, in the progress of which Miss Money naturally was deeply interested.

Miss Blanchet was in a flutter of excitement as she entered the sitting-room. As she was crossing its threshold she was considering whether she ought to present a copy of her poems to each of the three ladies or only to Mrs. Money; or whether she ought to tender the gift now or send it on by the post. The solemn eyes and imposing presence of Mrs. Money were almost alarming, and the trailing dresses and feathers of all the ladies sent a thrill of admiration and homage into the heart of the poetess—everything was so evidently put on regardless of expense. Little Mary had always been so poor and so stinted in the matter of wardrobe that she could not help admiring these splendidly dressed women. Mary, however, luckily remembered what was due to the dignity of poetic genius, and did not allow her homage to show itself too much in the form of trepidation. She instantly put on her best company manners, and spoke in the sweetly measured and genteel tone which she used to employ at Keeton, when she had occasion to interchange a word with the judges, or the sheriffs, or some eminent counsel.

"Minola will be home in a few moments—a very few," Miss Blanchet said. "Indeed, I expect her every minute. I know she would be greatly disappointed if she did not see you."

"Oh, I am not going without seeing Nola!" said Lucy.

"I am Minola's friend," Mary explained with placid dignity. "I may introduce myself. My brother, I know, has already the honor of your acquaintance. I am Miss Blanchet."

"Mr. Herbert Blanchet's sister?" Mrs. Money said in melancholy tone, but with delighted eyes. "This is indeed an unexpected and a very great pleasure."

"Why, you don't mean to say you are Herbert Blanchet's sister?" Lucy exclaimed, seizing both the hands of the poetess. "He's the most delightful creature, and a true poet. Oh, yes, a man of genius!"

The eyes of Mary moistened with happiness and pride.

"Herbert Blanchet is my brother. He is much younger than I; I need hardly say that. I used to take care of him years ago, almost as if I were his mother. We were a long time separated; he has been so much abroad."

The faithful Mary would not for all the world have suggested that their long separation was due to any indifference on the part of her brother. Indeed, at the moment she was not thinking of anything of the kind, only of his genius, and his beauty, and his noble heart.

"He never told me he had a sister," Mrs. Money said, "or I should have been delighted to call on you long ago, Miss Blanchet. It is your brother's fault, not mine. I shall tell him so."

"He did not know that I was coming to London," Mary was quick to explain. "He thought I was still living in Keeton. I only came to London with Minola."

"Oh! You lived in Keeton then always, along with Miss Grey!"

"How delightful!" Lucy exclaimed, desisting from her occupation of opening books and turning over music; "for you can tell us all about Nola and her love story."

"Her love story?" Mrs. Money repeated, in tones of melancholy inquiry.

"Her love story!" Miss Blanchet murmured tremulously, and wondering who had betrayed Minola's secret.

"Oh, yes," said Lucy decisively. "I know there's some love story—something romantic and delightful. Do tell us, Miss Blanchet."

Even the saint-like Theresa now showed a mild and becoming interest.

"It's not exactly a love story," Miss Blanchet said with some hesitation, not well knowing what she ought to reveal and what to keep back. "At least it's no love affair on Minola's part. She never was in love—never. She detests all love-making—at least she thinks so," the poetess said with a gentle sigh. "But there was a gentleman who was very much in love with her."

"Oh, she must have had heaps of lovers!" interposed Lucy.

Miss Blanchet then told the story of Mr. Augustus Sheppard, and how he was rich and handsome—at least rather handsome, she said—and how he wanted to marry Minola; and her people very much wished that she would have him, and she would not; and how at last she hastened her flight to London to get rid of him. All this was full of delightful interest to Lucy, and still further quickened the kindly sympathy of Mrs. Money. Then Mary Blanchet went into a long story about the death of Minola's mother and the second marriage of Minola's father, and then the father's death and the stepmother's second marriage, and the discomfort of the home which fate had thus provided for Minola. She expatiated upon the happiness of the sheltered life Minola had had while her mother was living, and the change that came upon her afterward, until the only doubt Mrs. Money had ever entertained about Minola—a doubt as to the perfect propriety and judgment of her coming to live almost alone in London—vanished altogether, and she regarded our heroine as a girl who had been driven from her home instead of having fled from it.

Mrs. Money delicately and cautiously approached the subject of Minola's means of subsistence. On this point no one could enlighten her better than Miss Blanchet, who knew to the sixpence the income and expenditure of her friend. Well, Minola was not badly off for a girl, Mrs. Money thought. A girl could live nicely and quietly, like a lady, but very quietly, on that. Besides, some rich man would be sure to fall in love with her.

"But she ought to have a great deal of money," the poetess eagerly explained, very proud of her leader's losses. "Her father was a rich man, quite a rich man, and he had quarrelled with her brother, and she ought to have all the money, only for that second marriage." Indeed, Miss Blanchet added the expression of her own profound conviction that there must have been some queer work—some concealment or something—about Mr. Grey's property, seeing that so little of it came to Minola.

"I'll get Mr. Money to look into all that," Mrs. Money said decisively. "He understands all about these things, and nothing could be hidden from him."

Miss Blanchet modestly intimated that she had confided her suspicions to her brother, and begged him to try and find out something.

"Oh, he never could understand anything about it!" Lucy said. "Poets never know about these things. It's just in papa's line. He'll find out. They can't baffle him. I know they have been cheating Nola—I know they have! I know there's a will hidden away somewhere, making her the rightful heir or whatever it is."

"About this gentleman—this lover. Is he a nice person?" Mrs. Money began.

"Mr. Augustus Sheppard?" Mary asked, mentioning his name for the first time in the conversation.

"Augustus Sheppard! Is that his name?" Lucy demanded eagerly.

"Why then, papa knows him! Indeed he does. I do declare papa knows everything!"

"Why do you think, dear, that he knows this gentleman?"

"Because I heard him asking Nola about Mr. Augustus Sheppard the other day, mamma, in our drawing-room."

"He couldn't have known this, I think," Miss Blanchet said.

"Oh, no, I suppose not; but he knows him, and he'll tell us all about him. Why wouldn't Nola have him, Miss Blanchet?"

"He is rather a formal sort of person, and heavy, and not the least in the world poetic or romantic; and Minola does not like him at all. She doesn't think his feelings are very deep; but there I am sure she is wrong," the poetess added emphatically. "She has never had occasion to make a study of human feelings as others have."

"You think he has deep feelings?" Mrs. Money asked, turning the full light of her melancholy eyes upon Mary, and with her whole soul already in the question.

"Oh, yes; I know he has. I know that he will persevere, and will try to make Minola marry him still. He is a man I should be afraid of if he were disappointed. I should indeed."

"Mamma, don't you think we had better have Nola to stay with us for a while?" Lucy asked. "Miss Blanchet could describe him, or get a photograph, and we could give orders that no such man was ever to be admitted if he should call and ask to see her. Some one should always go out with her, or she should only go in the carriage. I dread this man; I do indeed. Miss Blanchet is quite right, and she knows more than she says, I dare say. Such terrible things have happened, you know. I read in a paper the other day of a young man who fell in love with a girl—in the country it was, I think, or in Spain perhaps, or somewhere—and she would not marry him; and he hid himself with a long dagger, and when she was going to church he stabbed her several times."

"I don't think Mr. Augustus Sheppard would be likely to do anything of that kind," Miss Blanchet said. "He's a very respectable man, and a steady, grave sort of person."

"You never can tell," Lucy declared. "When those quiet men are in love and disappointed, they are dreadful! I've read a great many things just like that in books."

"Well, dear," Mrs. Money said, "we'll ask your papa. If he knows this gentleman—this person—he can tell us what sort of man he is. It doesn't seem that he is in London now."

"He may have come to-day," said Lucy.

Miss Theresa looked at her watch.

"Mamma dear, I don't think Miss Grey is coming in just yet, and it's growing late, and I have to attend the Ladies' Committee of the Saint Angulphus Association, at four."

"You go, mamma, with Theresa," Lucy exclaimed. "I'll wait; I must see Nola. I begin to be alarmed. It's very odd her staying out. I think something must really have happened. That man may have been in town, waiting somewhere. You go. When I have seen Nola, and am satisfied that she is safe, I can get home in the omnibus, or the underground, or the steamboat, or somehow. I'll find my way, you may be sure."

"My dear," her mother said, "you were never in an omnibus in your life."

"Papa goes in omnibuses, and he says he doesn't care whether other people do or not."

"But a lady, my dear——"

"Oh, I've seen them in the streets full of women! They don't object to ladies at all."

"But my dear young lady," Miss Blanchet pleaded, "there is not the slightest occasion for your staying. Mr. Sheppard isn't at all that kind of person. Minola is quite safe. She is often out much later than this, although I confess that I did expect her home much earlier to-day."

"I'll stay till Nola comes," the positive little Lucy declared, "unless Miss Blanchet turns me out; and there's an end of that. So, mamma dear, you and Tessy do as you please, and never mind me."

"When Minola does come——" Mary Blanchet began to say.

"When she does come?" Lucy interrupted in portentous accents. "Say if she does come, Miss Blanchet."

"When she does come, please don't say anything of Mr. Sheppard. Of course she would not like to think that we spoke about such a subject."

"Oh, of course, of course!" all the ladies chorused, with looks expressive of immense caution and discretion; and in true feminine fashion all honestly assuming that there could be nothing wrong in talking over anybody's supposed secrets so long as the person concerned did not know of the talk.

"I see Miss Grey," said the quiet Theresa suddenly. She had been looking out of the window to see if the carriage was near. As a professed saint she had naturally less interest in ordinary human creatures than her mother and sister had.

"Thank heaven!" Lucy exclaimed.

"Dear Lucy!" Theresa interposed in tones of mild remonstrance, as if she would suggest that not everybody had a right to make reference to heaven, and that heaven would probably resent any allusion to it by the unqualified.

"Well, I am thankful that she is coming all the same; but I wish you wouldn't call her Miss Grey, Tessy. It seems cold and unfriendly. Call her Nola, please."

Mary Blanchet went to the door and exchanged a brief word or two with Minola, in order that she might be prepared for her visitors. Minola came in, looking very handsome, with her color heightened by a quick walk home and the little excitement of her morning.

"How lovely you are looking, Nola, dear!" Lucy exclaimed, after the first greetings were over. "You look as if you had been having an adventure."

"I have had a sort of adventure," Minola answered with a faint blush.

The one thought went through the minds of all her listeners at the same moment, and it shaped itself into a name—"Mr. Augustus Sheppard." All were silent and breathless.

"It was not much," Minola hastened to say. "Only I met Mr. Victor Heron in Regent's Park, and I have been walking with him."

Most of her listeners seemed relieved.

"I wish I had met him," Lucy blurted out. "He is very handsome, and I should like to have walked with him. Oh, what nonsense I am talking!" and she grew red, and jumped up and looked out of the window.

Then they all talked about something else, and the visit closed with a promise that Minola and Mary Blanchet would present themselves at one of Mrs. Money's little weekly receptions, out of season, which was to take place the following evening; and after which Mrs. Money hoped to decoy them into staying for the night. Mary Blanchet went to bed that night in an ecstasy of happiness, only disturbed now and then by a torturing doubt as to whether Mrs. Money would be equally willing to receive her if she had known that she had been the keeper of the court-house at Keeton; and whether she ought not to forewarn Mrs. Money of the fact; and whether she ought not, at least, to call Minola's attention to the question, and submit to her judgment.

CHAPTER IX.

IN SOCIETY.

Mr. Money was not a very regular visitor at his wife's little receptions out of the season. In the season, and when they had larger and more formal gatherings, he showed himself as much as was fitting and regular; for many of the guests then were virtually his guests, persons who desired especially to see him, and of whose topics he could talk. A good many foreign visitors were there usually—scientific men, and railway contractors, and engineers, and shipbuilders, from Germany, Italy, and Russia, and of course the United States, who looked upon Mr. Money as a person of great importance and distinction, and would not have cared anything about most of Mrs. Money's guests.

The foreigners were curiously right and wrong. Mr. Money was a person of importance and distinction. Every Londoner who knew anything knew his name, and knew that he was clever and distinguished. If a Russian stranger of rank were dining with a Cabinet minister, and were to express a wish to see and know Mr. Money, the minister would think the wish quite natural, and would take his friend down to the lobby of the House of Commons, and make him acquainted with Mr. Money. We have all been foreigners ourselves somewhere, and we know how our longing to see some celebrity, as we suppose, of the land we are visiting, some one whose name was familiar to us in England, has been occasionally checked and chilled by our finding that in the celebrity's own city no one seems to have heard of him. There are only too many celebrities of this kind which shine, like the moon, for those who are a long way off. But Mr. Money was a man of mark in London, as well as in St. Petersburg and New York. Therein the foreigners found themselves right. Yet Mr. Money's position was somewhat peculiar for all that, in a manner no stranger could well appreciate. The Cabinet minister did not ask Mr. Money to meet his friend at dinner; or, at all events, would never have been able to say to his friend, "Money? Oh, yes! Of course you ought to know him. He is coming to-morrow to dine with us. Won't you come and meet him?" The most the Cabinet minister would do would be to get up a little dinner party, suitably adjusted for the express purpose of bringing his friend and Mr. Money together. It would be too much to say that Mr. Money was under a cloud. There rather seemed to be a sort of faint idea abroad that he ought to be, or some day would be, under a cloud, no one knew why.

No such considerations as these, however, would have affected the company who gathered round Mrs. Money in the out-of-season evenings, or could have been appreciated by them. They were, for the most part, entirely out of Mr. Money's line. He came among them irregularly and at intervals; and if he found there any man or woman he knew or was taken with, he talked to him or her a good deal, and perhaps, if it were a man, he carried him and one or two others off to his own study or smoking-room, where they discoursed at their ease. Sometimes Lucelet was sent to her papa, if he was not making his appearance in the drawing-room, to beg him to accomplish some such act of timely intervention. Somebody, perhaps, presented himself among Mrs. Money's guests who was rather too solid, or grave, or scientific, or political, to care for the general company, and to be of any social benefit to them; or some one, as we have said, in whose eyes Mr. Money would be a celebrity, and Mrs. Money's guests counted for nothing. Then Lucy went for her father, if he was in the house, and drew him forth. He was wonderfully genial with his womankind. They might disturb him at any moment and in any way they chose. He seemed to have as little idea of grumbling if they disturbed him as a Newfoundland dog would have of snapping at his master's children if they insisted on rousing him up from his doze in the sun.

Mr. Money talked very frankly of his daughters and their prospects sometimes.

"My girls are going to marry any one they like," he would often say; "the poorer the better, so far as I am concerned, so long as they like the girls and the girls like them." As chance would have it, a rich man fell in love with Theresa, and she, in her quiet, sanctimonious way, loved him, and that was settled.

"Now, Lucelet, look out for yourself," Mr. Money would, say to his blushing daughter. "If you fall in love with some fine young fellow, I don't care if he hasn't sixpence. Only be sure, Mrs. Lucelet, that you are in love with him, and that he is in love with you, and not with your expectations."

Lucelet generally smiled and saucily tossed her head, as one who should say that she considered herself a person quite qualified to make an impression without the help of any expectations.

"I sometimes wish the right man would come along, Lucelet," Mr. Money said one day, throwing his arm round his pretty daughter's shoulder, and drawing her to him.

"Papa! do you want to get rid of me so soon? I wonder at you. I know I don't want to get rid of you."

"No, no, dear; it isn't that. Never mind. Where's your mamma? Just run and ask her"—and Mr. Money started something else, and put an end to the conversation.

Mr. Money's ideas with regard to the future of his daughters did not fail to become known among his acquaintances in general, and would doubtless have drawn young men in goodly numbers around his home, even if Lucelet were far less pretty than she really was. But in any case Mrs. Money loved to be friendly to young people, and her less formal parties were largely attended, almost always, by the young. Miss Theresa's future husband did not come there often. He had known the family chiefly through Mr. Money and Parliament; and, coming once to dine with Mr. Money, he fell fairly in love with the dove-like eyes and saintly ways of Theresa. Theresa was therefore what her father would have called "out of the swim." She looked tolerantly upon her mother's little gatherings of poets en herbe, artists who were great to their friends, patriots hunting for constituencies, orators who had not yet caught the speaker's eye, and persons who had tried success in all these various paths and failed. She looked on them tolerantly, but her soul was not in them; it floated above them in a purer atmosphere. It was now, indeed, floating among the spires of the church which her lover was to build.

One peculiarity seemed common to the guests whom Mrs. Money gathered around her. On any subject in which they felt the slightest interest they never felt the slightest doubt. The air they breathed was that of conviction; the language they talked was that of dogma. The men and women they knew were the greatest, most gifted, and most beautiful in the world; the men and women they did not know were nothing—were beneath contempt. Every one had what Lowell calls an "I-turn-the-crank-of-the-universe air." In that charmed circle every one was either a genius destined yet to move the world, or a genius too great for the dull, unworthy world to comprehend. It was a happy circle, where success or failure came to just the same.

All in a flutter of delight was Mary Blanchet when preparing to enter that magical circle. She was going at last to meet great men and brilliant women. Perhaps, some day, she might even come to be known among them—to shine among them. She could never be done embracing Minola for having brought her to the gate of that heaven. She spent all the day dressing herself and adjusting her hair; but as the hours went on she became almost wretched from nervousness. When it was nearly time for them to go she was quivering with agitation. They went in a brougham hired specially for the occasion, because, although Mrs. Money offered to send her carriage, and Mary would have liked it much, Minola would hear of nothing of the kind. Mary was engaged all the way in the brougham in the proper adjustment of her gloves. At last they came to the place. Minola did the gentleman's part, and handed her agitated companion out. Mary Blanchet saw a strip of carpet on the pavement, an open door with servants in livery standing about, blazing lights, brightly dressed women going in, a glimpse of a room with a crowd of people, and then Minola and she found themselves somehow in a ladies' dressing-room.

"Minola, darling, don't go in without me. I am quite nervous—I should never venture to go in alone."

Minola did not intend to desert her palpitating little companion, who now indeed clung to her skirts and would not let her go had she been inclined. Miss Blanchet might have been a young beauty just about to make her début at a ball, so anxious was she about her appearance, about her dress, about her complexion; and at the same time she was so nervous that she could hardly compel her trembling fingers to give the finishing touches which she believed herself to need. Minola looked on wondering, puzzled, and half angry. The poetess was unmistakably a little, withered, yellowing old maid. She had not even the remains of good looks. No dressing or decoration possible to woman could make her anything but what she was, or deceive any one about her, or induce any one to feel interested in her. The handsome, stately girl who stood smiling near her was about to enter the drawing-room quite unconcerned as to her own appearance, and indeed not thinking about it; and the homely little old maid was quite distressed lest the company generally should not sufficiently admire her, or should find any fault with her dress.

"Come along, you silly poetess," said Minola at last, breaking into a laugh, and fairly drawing her companion away from the looking-glass. "What do you think anybody will care about you or me? We'll steal in unnoticed, and we'll be all right."

"It's the first time I ever was in London society, Minola, dear, and I'm quite nervous."

"It's the first time I ever was in London society, and I'm not a bit nervous. No one knows us, dear—and no one cares. So come along."

She fairly carried Mary Blanchet out of the dressing-room, along a corridor lined with seats, on which people who had been in the drawing-room and had come out, were chattering, and flirting, and lounging—and at last over the threshold of the drawing-room, and into the presence of the hostess. A few friendly words were got through, and Minola dragged her companion along through the crowd into the recess formed by a window where there were some unoccupied seats.

"Now, Mary, that's done. The plunge is made, dear! We are in society! Let us sit down here—and look at it."

"This," said Mary faintly—"this, at last, is society."

"I suppose it is, dear. At least it will do very well for you and me. We should never know any difference. Imagine all these people marquises and countesses, and what more can we want to make us happy? They may be marquises and countesses for all I know."

"I should think there must be some great poets, and authors, and artists, Minola. I am sure there must be. Oh, there is my brother!"

In effect Mr. Herbert Blanchet had already fixed his dark eyes on Minola, and was making his way up to her retreat, rather to Minola's distress. He addressed Minola at once with that undefinable manner of easy and kindly superiority which he always adopted toward women, and which, it must be owned, impressed some women a great deal. To his sister he held out, while hardly looking at her, an encouraging hand of recognition.

"Have you seen Delavar's picture?" he asked Minola.

"No. Who is Delavar?"

"Delavar? He was the greatest painter of our time—at least of his school; for I don't admit that his school is the true one."

"Oh, is his picture here?"

"In the other room—yes. He painted it for Mr. Money—for Mrs. Money rather I should say—and it has just been sent home. Come with me and I will show it to you."

"And Mary?"

"We'll come back for Mary presently. The rooms are too full. We couldn't all get through. If you'll take my arm, Miss Grey!"

Minola rose and took his arm, and they made their way slowly through the room. They moved even more slowly than was necessary, for Herbert Blanchet was particularly anxious to show off his companion and himself to the fullest advantage. The moment Minola entered the room he saw that she was the handsomest girl there, and that her dressing was simple, graceful, and picturesque. He knew that before a quarter of an hour had passed everybody would be asking who she was, and he resolved to secure for himself the effect of being the first to parade her through the rooms. He was a singularly handsome man—as has been said before—almost oppressively handsome; and a certain wasted look about his eyes and cheeks added a new and striking effect to his appearance. He was dark, she was fair; he was a tall man, she was a rather tall girl; and if his face had a worn look, hers had an expression of something like habitual melancholy, which was not perhaps in keeping with her natural temperament, and which lent by force of contrast an additional charm to her eyes when they suddenly lit up at the opening of any manner of animated conversation. No combination could be more effective, Mr. Blanchet felt, than that of his appearance and hers; and then she was a new figure. So he passed slowly on with her, and he knew that most people looked at them as they passed. He took good care, too, that they should be engaged in earnest talk.

"I am delighted to have you all to myself for a moment, Miss Grey—to tell you that I know all about your goodness to Mary. That is why I would not bring her with us now. No—you must let me speak—I am not offering you my thanks. I know you would not care about that. But I must tell you that I know what you have done. I have no doubt that you are her sole support—poor Mary!"

"I am her friend, Mr. Blanchet—only that."

"Her only friend too. Her brother has not done much for her. To tell you the truth, Miss Grey, it isn't in his power now. You don't know the struggles of us, the unsuccessful men in literature, who yet have faith in ourselves. I am very poor. My utmost effort goes in keeping a decent dress-coat and buying a pair of gloves; I don't complain—I am not one bit deterred, and I only trouble you with this confession, because whatever I may have been in the past I had rather you knew me to be what I am—a wretched, penniless struggler—than believe that I left my sister to be a burden on your friendship."

"Mary is the only friend I have," said Minola. "It is not wonderful if I wish to keep her with me. And you will make a great success some time."

He shook his head.

"If one hadn't to grind at things for bare living, one might do something. I am not bad enough, or good enough; and that's the truth of it. I dare say if I were mean enough to hunt after some woman with money, I might have succeeded as well as others—but I couldn't do that."

"No, I am sure you could not."

"I am not mean enough for that. But I am not high-minded enough to accept any path, and be content with it and proud of it. Now I shan't bore you any more about myself. I wanted you to know this that you might not think too harshly of me. I know you felt some objection to me at first; you need not try politely to deny it."

"Oh, no; I don't want to deny it. I prefer truth to politeness, a great deal. I did think you had neglected your sister; but really I was not surprised. I believe other men do the same thing."

"But now you see that I have some excuse?"

"I am glad to hear it, Mr. Blanchet."

"Glad to hear that I am so wretchedly poor, Miss Grey?" he said with a smile, and bending his eyes on her. "Glad to hear that your friend's brother is such a failure?"

"I would rather a thousand times hear that you were poor than that you were heartless. I don't call it a failure to be poor. I should call it a failure to be selfish and mean."

She spoke in a low tone, but very earnestly and eagerly, and she suddenly thought she was speaking too eagerly, and stopped.

"Well," he said, after a moment's pause, "here is the picture. We shall get to it presently, when these people move away."

They had entered, through a curtained door, a small room which was nearly filled with people standing before a picture, and admiringly criticising it. Minola, with all her real or fancied delight in noting the jealousies and weaknesses of men and women, could hear no words of detraction or even dispraise.

"Is the painter here?" she asked of her companion in a whisper.

"No; I haven't seen him. Perhaps he'll come in later on."

"Would you think it cheap cynicism if I were to ask why they all praise the picture—why they don't find any fault with it?"

"Oh, because they are all of the school, and they must support their creed. Our art is a creed to us. I don't admit that I am of Delavar's school any more; in fact, I look upon him as a heretic. He is going in for mere popularity; success has spoilt him. But to most of these people here he is still a divinity. They haven't found him out yet."

"Oh!"

This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at length struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the whole of the picture.

"What is it called?" she asked.

"Love stronger than death."

The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon, rising in a livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator was seen a freshly-opened grave. In the foreground were two figures—one that of a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled from her coffin, wrapped as she was in her cerements of the tomb; the other that of the lover. He had propped the body against the broken hillock of the grave, and he was chanting a love-song to it which he accompanied on his lute. His face suggested the last stage of a galloping consumption, further enlivened by the fearsome light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary bats flopped and lollopped through the air, and a few sympathetic toads came out to listen to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as if they swayed and moaned to the music; and the rank weeds and grasses were mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn musician.

Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there followed a shocking inclination to laugh.

"What do you think of it?" Blanchet asked.

"Oh, I don't like it at all."

"No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness; just a striving after drawing-room popularity. No depth of feeling; no care for the realistic power of the scene. Pretty, pleasing—nothing more. Surface only; no depth."

"But it is hideous," Minola said.

"Hideous? Oh, no! Decay is loveliness; decay is the soul of really high art when you come to understand it. But there is no real decay there. That girl's face is pretty waxwork. There's no death there," and he turned half away in contempt. "That is what comes of being popular and a success. No; Delavar is done. I told him so."

"He is quite new to me," said Minola. "I never heard of him before."

"He's getting old now," Blanchet said. "He must be quite thirty. Let me see—oh, yes; fully that. He had better join the pre-Raphaelites now; or send to the Royal Academy; or hire a gallery and exhibit his pictures at a shilling a head. I fancy they would be quite a success."

Some of this conversation took place as they were making their way through the crowd with the intention of entering the drawing-room again. Minola was greatly amused, and in a manner interested. The whole thing was entirely new to her. As they passed into the corridor there were one or two vacant seats.

"Will you rest for a moment?" Blanchet said, motioning toward a seat.

"Hadn't we better go back for Mary?"

"We'll go back presently. She is very happy; she loves above all things observing a crowd."

Minola would have liked very much to observe the crowd herself and to have people pointed out to her. Blanchet, however, though he saluted several persons here and there, did not seem particularly interested in any of them. Minola sat down for a while to please him, and to show that she had no thought of giving herself airs merely because she was enabled to be kind to his sister.

Blanchet threw himself sidelong across his chair and leaned toward Minola's seat. He knew that people were looking at him and wondering who his companion was, and he felt very happy.

"I wish I might read some of my poems to you, Miss Grey," he said. "I should like to have your opinion, because I know it would be sincere."

"I should be delighted to hear them, but I don't think I should venture to give an opinion; my opinion would not be worth anything."

"When may I come and read one or two to you and Mary? To-morrow afternoon?"

"Oh, yes; we are staying here tonight, but we shall be at home in the afternoon. Are these published poems? Pray, excuse me—I quite forgot; you don't publish. You don't care for fame—the fame that sets other people wild."

He smiled, and slightly shrugged his shoulders.

"We don't care for the plaudits of the stupid crowd," he said; "that is quite true. We don't care for popularity, and to have our books lying on drawing-room tables, and kept by the booksellers bound in morocco ready to hand, to be given away as gift books to young ladies. But we should like the admiration of a chosen few. The truth is, that I don't publish my poems because I haven't the money. They would be a dead loss, of course, to any one who printed them; I am proud to say that. I would not have them printed at all if they couldn't be artistically and fitly brought out; and I haven't the money, and there's an end. But if I might read my poems to you, that would be something."

Minola began to be full of pity for the poor poet, between whom and possible fame there stood so hard and prosaic a barrier. She was touched by the proud humility of his confession of ambition and poverty. Three sudden questions flashed through her mind. "I wonder how much it would cost? and have I money enough? and would it be possible to get him to take it?"

Her color was positively heightening, and her breath becoming checked by the boldness of these thoughts, when suddenly there was a rushing and rustling of silken skirts, and Lucy Money, disengaging herself from a man's arm, swooped upon her.

"You darlingest, dear Nola, where have you been all the night? I have been hunting for you everywhere! Oh—Mr. Blanchet! I haven't seen you before either. Have you two been wandering about together all the evening?"

Looking up, Minola saw that it was Mr. Victor Heron who had been with Lucy Money, and that he was now waiting with a smile of genial friendliness to be recognized by Miss Grey. It must be owned that Minola felt a little embarrassed, and would rather—though she could not possibly tell why—not have been found deep in confidential talk with Herbert Blanchet.

She gave Mr. Heron her hand, and told him—which was now the truth—that she was glad to see him.

"Hadn't we better go and find Mary?" Blanchet said, rising and glancing slightly at Heron. "She will be expecting us."

"No, please don't take Miss Grey away just yet," Victor said, addressing himself straightway, and with eyes of unutterable cordiality and good-fellowship, to the poet. "I haven't spoken a word to her yet; and I have to go away soon."

"I'll go with you to your sister, Mr. Blanchet," said Lucy, taking his arm forthwith. "I haven't seen her all the evening, and I want to talk to her very much."

So Lucy swept away on Mr. Blanchet's arm, looking very fair, and petite, and pretty, as she held a bundle of her draperies in one hand, and glanced back, smiling and nodding, out of sheer good-nature, at Minola.

Victor Heron sat down by Minola, and at once plunged into earnest talk.

TRIED AND TRUE.

Year after year we'll gather here,

And pass the night in merry cheer.