Louise is a younger, handsomer, more impetuous, less clever edition of
Rachel Percival; but she is of that order. She is less concentrated and
more emotional than Rachel. I did not quite know how a great sorrow would
affect Louise. Rachel would use it as a stepping-stone towards heaven.

I have seen a young, untried race-horse with small, pointed, restless
ears; with delicate nostrils where the red blood showed; with full, soft
eyes where fire flashed; with a satin skin so thin and glossy that even
the lightest hand would cause it to quiver to the touch; where pride and
fire and royal blood seemed to urge a trial of their powers; and I have
thought: "You are capable of passing anything on the track and coming
under the wire triumphant and victorious; or you might fulfil your
prophecy equally well by falling dead in your first heat, with the red
blood gushing from those thin nostrils. We can be sure of nothing until
you are tried, but it is a quivering delight to look at you and to share
your impatience and to wonder what you will do."

Occasionally I see women who affect me in the same way--idealists, capable
of being wounded through their sensitiveness by things which we ordinary
mortals accept philosophically; capable also of greater heights of
happiness and lower depths of misery, but of suffering most through being
misunderstood. To this class Rachel and Louise belong. Rachel, in
Percival, has reached a haven where she rides at anchor, sheltered from
such storms as had hitherto almost engulfed her, and growing more
heroically beautiful in character day by day. Poor Louise is still at sea,
with a great storm brewing. How hard, how terribly hard, to talk to
Charlie Hardy about her, when, after the solemnity of an engagement tie
between them, he was capable of misunderstanding, not only her, but the
whole situation so blindly! But what a calamity it would be if Louise
should marry him!

"Go on, Ruth. Say something, do. I imagine all sorts of things while you
just sit there looking at me so solemnly. I realize that I am in a tight
place. I did hope that you could see some way out of it for me; but I
know, by the way you act, that you think I ought to give up Frankie--dear
little girl!--and marry Louise, and by Jove! if you say it's the handsome
thing to do, I'll do it."

This still more effectually closed my lips. He so evidently thought that
he was being heroic. He added rather reluctantly, "I must say that I
su