f Adam cast out of Eden?
(And O the Bower and the hour!)
Lo! with care like a shadow shaken
He kills the hard earth whence he was taken."

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

I

To the ordinary observer Lizzie Rand was, during that hot July, as she
had ever been.

The servants in 104 Portland Place could detect no change, but then they
did not search for one, having long regarded Miss Rand as a piece of
machinery, symbolized by that broad shining belt of hers, happily
calculated to fit, precisely, the duties for which it was required.

But Miss Rand herself knew that there was a sharp, accurate, shrewd
piece of machinery named Miss Rand, and a breathing, emotional,
uncertain human being called Lizzie. There had always been those two,
but since the inadequacy of her mother and sister had been confronted
with the stern necessity of making two ends meet, Miss Rand had been in
constant demand and Lizzie had only, by her occasional obtrusion, made
life complicated and disturbing.

Miss Rand had told herself that Lizzie was now almost an anachronism,
that the emotions in life that aroused her were bad cheap emotions, and
that this was an age that demanded increasingly of women a hard
practical efficiency without sentiments or enthusiasms.

These forcible arguments had for a time kept Lizzie in a darkened
background; it was some years since Miss Rand had been disturbed. But
now in the warm weather of 1898 Lizzie had not only reappeared, but had
leapt, an insistent, shining presence, into urgent life. Miss Rand
faced her--what had created her? A little, the weather, the beauty of
those brazen days--A little, Rachel's coming out into the world, an
adventure that had stirred the whole house into a new and sympathetic
excitement--a little, these things. But chiefly, and no pretence nor
shame could conceal the fact, did this new Lizzie owe her creation to
the appearance of Francis Breton.

Lizzie Rand had had, from her birth, a romantic heart; she had had also
a prosaic practical exterior, and a mind as hard and clear, if
necessary, as her own most lucent typewriter.

The romantic heart had, throughout these years, been there, and now this
romantic, scandalous, youthful, engaging unfortunate had called it out.

She was never so warmly attracted as by someone lacking, most obviously,
in those qualities with which she herself abounded. That people should
be foolish, impetuous, careless, haphazard commended the