. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy
Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the
expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of
artists.

The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate
suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home,
buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about
1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were
begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr
Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy
and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life
among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan
natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of
'Tusitala.'

CHAPTER VIII

HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS

... 'What we seek is but our other self
Other and higher, neither wholly like
Nor wholly different, the half life the gods
Retained when half was given--one the man
And one the woman.'...--_Epic of Hades_.
L. MORRIS.

'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'
--ROBERT RICHARDSON.

It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's
temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had
been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of
womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that
he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give
his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track
of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he
met in his young manhood, is not surprising.

The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in
womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty
young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing
advice as to matrimony which he gives in _Virginibus Puerisque_, was as
applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society
was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother,
'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns
the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more
comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to
have