"It's not that; it is that, if I went to her friends, I should never
get her real opinion from them. At least I should never know if it
is _was_ her real opinion; and therefore I should be no farther
advanced. Don't you see?"

Durham struggled between the sentimental impulse to soothe her, and
the practical instinct that it was a moment for unmitigated
frankness.

"I'm not sure that I do; but if you can't find out what Madame de
Treymes thinks, I'll see what I can do myself."

"Oh--_you_!" broke from her in mingled terror and admiration; and
pausing on her doorstep to lay her hand in his before she touched
the bell, she added with a half-whimsical flash of regret: "Why
didn't this happen to Fanny Frisbee?"

III

Why had it not happened to Fanny Frisbee?

Durham put the question to himself as he walked back along the
quays, in a state of inner commotion which left him, for once,
insensible to the ordered beauty of his surroundings. Propinquity
had not been lacking: he had known Miss Frisbee since his college
days. In unsophisticated circles, one family is apt to quote
another; and the Durham ladies had always quoted the Frisbees. The
Frisbees were bold, experienced, enterprising: they had what the
novelists of the day called "dash." The beautiful Fanny was
especially dashing; she had the showiest national attributes,
tempered only by a native grace of softness, as the beam of her eyes
was subdued by the length of their lashes. And yet young Durham,
though not unsusceptible to such charms, had remained content to
enjoy them from a safe distance of good fellowship. If he had been
asked why, he could not have told; but the Durham of forty
understood. It was because there were, with minor modifications,
many other Fanny Frisbees; whereas never before, within his ken, had
there been a Fanny de Malrive.

He had felt it in a flash, when, the autumn before, he had run
across her one evening in the dining-room of the Beaurivage at
Ouchy; when, after a furtive exchange of glances, they had
simultaneously arrived at recognition, followed by an eager pressure
of hands, and a long evening of reminiscence on the starlit terrace.
She was the same, but so mysteriously changed! And it was the
mystery, the sense of unprobed depths of initiation, which drew him
to her as her freshness had never drawn him. He had not hitherto
attempted to define the nature of the change: it remained for his
sister Nannie to do that wh