once given her, I surmise, to guess that they anywhere fell
short. So gently used, all round indeed, was this large, elegant,
extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady, whose genius
was all for friendship, admiration, declamation and expenditure, that
one doubted whether in the whole course of her career she had ever once
been brought up, as it were, against a recognised reality; other at
least perhaps than the tiresome cost of the materially agreeable in life
and the perverse appearance, at times, that though she "said" things,
otherwise recited choice morceaux, whether French or English, with a
marked oddity of manner, of "attack," a general incongruity of
drawing-room art, the various contributive elements, hour, scene,
persuaded patience and hushed attention, were perforce a precarious
quantity.

It is in that bygone old grace of the unexploded factitious, the air of
a thousand dimmed illusions and more or less early Victorian beatitudes
on the part of the blandly idle and the supposedly accomplished, that
Mrs. Greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity,
is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining
specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social
order. Just so she has happy suggestion; just so, whether or no by a
twist of my mind toward the enviability of certain complacencies of
faith and taste that we would yet neither live back into if we could,
nor can catch again if we would. I see my forgotten friend of that moist
autumn afternoon of our call, and of another, on the morrow, which I
shall not pass over, as having rustled and gushed and protested and
performed through her term under a kind of protection by the easy-going
gods that is not of this fierce age. Amiabilities and absurdities,
harmless serenities and vanities, pretensions and undertakings
unashamed, still profited by the mildness of the critical air and the
benignity of the social--on the right side at least of the social line.
It had struck me from the first that nowhere so much as in England was
it fortunate to _be_ fortunate, and that against that condition, once it
had somehow been handed down and determined, a number of the sharp
truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in
vain. I say beautifully for I confess without scruple to have found
again and again at that time an attaching charm in the general
exhibition of enjoyed immunity, paid