every trouble of which the human heart
is capable; and as such she was, under a thin disguise, celebrated by
the first Lord Lytton in one of his latest novels. To these ladies might
be added innumerable others whose claims on my memory do not in all
cases lend themselves to very exact statement. Most of them were
English, and some of them, then in the bloom of youth and beauty, have
between that time and this played their parts in the London world and
ended them. But not a few were foreign--vivacious Northerners from New
York, with the sublimated wealth of all Paris in their petticoats;
Southerners whose eyes were still plaintive with memories of the Civil
War; Austrians such as the von Hugels; Germans such as Countess Marie
and Countess Helen Bismarck; and Russians whose figures and faces I
remember much more accurately than their names.

It is idle, however, to say more of these, whose charms are with the
last year's snows. And yet of these there were two of whom I may, for
purposes of illustration, say something in detail. The two were
sisters--we may call them Miss X and Miss Y--whose invalid father, a
cadet of a well-known family, rarely left Torquay, where for some months
of the year his daughters, otherwise emancipated from parental control,
stayed with him. Both of these sisters were beautiful, and, so far as
the resident ladies of Torquay were concerned, they received what is
incomparably the sincerest form of homage that extraordinary beauty can
elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as
possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her
reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it
(I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the
colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of
dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any
prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often
fulfill themselves, but an exception to this rule was one day made in my
favor.

As I was going home for my holidays from Littlehampton to Devonshire, my
compartment at Eastleigh Junction was invaded by a feminine apparition,
accompanied by a French poodle, which she placed on the cushion opposite
to her. Her dress, though I divined its perfection, was quiet and plain
enough; but the compartment, as soon as she entered it, seemed to be
filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sun