be so
anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....

'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what
did you think of the Breton peasant?'

'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition
of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
Settlement.'

'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.

I rose.

'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have
never heard you play, and everyone says--'

'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated
across the room.

'What, mamma?'

'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal
to playing.'

My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became
violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt
murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I
said, with sugar in my voice:

'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'

It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with
formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without
apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess.
And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in
a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience,
my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love,
to whom love could not fail to bring cal