the chill began to
penetrate.

She contemplated the figure before her. Undoubtedly a pretty
creature, and one that would have had a success at Farringford.
Strange how easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors. She
had seen with her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody--turn,
positively, his back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him
honour, and withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever
heard of, who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only
merit--if it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance--was beauty.
Beauty! All over before you can turn round. An affair, one might
almost say, of minutes. Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do
what it liked with men. Even husbands were not immune. There had been
passages in the life of Mr. Fisher . . .

"I expect the journey has upset you," she said in her deep voice.
"What you want is a good dose of some simple medicine. I shall ask
Domenico if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil."

Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.

"Ah," said Mrs. Fisher, "I knew you were not asleep. If you had
been you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground."

"Waste," said Mrs. Fisher. "I don't like smoking for women, but
I still less like waste."

"What does one do with people like this?" Scrap asked herself,
her eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare
but appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.

"Now you'll take my advice," said Mrs. Fisher, touched, "and not
neglect what may very well turn into an illness. We are in Italy, you
know, and one has to be careful. You ought, to begin with, to go to
bed."

"I never go to bed," snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as
forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing
the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House--"I'm always
moving on," said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman;
and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet
parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.

It was wonderful, Scrap's voice. It had given her, in the ten
years since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit
can have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable. She ought,
with a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every
kind of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the sp