y rubbed
her white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the
first signs of twilight--the long June day allowing us to dine without
candles.. Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to her
brother's discourse; but on the other hand she was much engaged in
watching its effect upon me. Her lustreless pupils continued to attach
themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to
another century that kept them from being importunate. She seemed to
look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished the
vividness of the performance. It was as if she knew in a general way
that her brother must be talking very well, but she herself was so rich
in ideas that she had no need to pick them up, and was at liberty to see
what would become of a young American when subjected to a high aesthetic
temperature.

The temperature was aesthetic, certainly, but it was less so than I could
have desired, for I was unsuccessful in certain little attempts to make
Mark Ambient talk about himself I tried to put him on the ground of his
own writings, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted
the saddle to one of his contemporaries. He talked about Balzac and
Browning, and what was being done in foreign countries, and about his
recent tour in the East, and the extraordinary forms of life that one
saw in that part of the world. I perceived that he had reasons for not
wishing to descant upon literature, and suffered him without protest
to deliver himself on certain social topics, which he treated with
extraordinary humor and with constant revelations of that power of
ironical portraiture of which his books are full. He had a great deal
to say about London, as London appears to the observer who does n't fear
the accusation of cynicism, during the high-pressure time--from April
to July--of its peculiarities. He flashed his faculty of making the
fanciful real and the real fanciful over the perfunctory pleasures and
desperate exertions of so many of his compatriots, among whom there were
evidently not a few types for which he had little love. London bored him,
and he made capital sport of it; his only allusion, that I can remember,
to his own work was his saying that he meant some day to write an
immense grotesque epic of London society. Miss Ambient's perpetual gaze
seemed to say to me: "Do you perceive how artistic we are? Frankly now,
is it possible to be more artistic than this? You