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

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

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

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

'Of course, his governor was furious, and, settling a very small
allowance on the poor beggar, turned him out of the family home, and
forbade him to ever darken, &c., &c.