and with a little good will on both sides you
can easily get out of your tangle.' But he would n't listen to me; he
stopped me short. I saw I should excite him if I insisted; so I dropped
the subject. But it is not for long; he shall listen to me."

Later she wrote that Blanche had in fact "backed out," and would
not come to stay with them, having given as an excuse that she was
perpetually trying on dresses, and that at Mrs. Vivian's she should be
at an inconvenient distance from the temple of these sacred rites, and
the high priest who conducted the worship. "But we see her every day,"
said Angela, "and mamma is constantly with her. She likes mamma better
than me. Mamma listens to her a great deal and talks to her a little--I
can't do either when we are alone. I don't know what she says--I mean
what mamma says; what Blanche says I know as well as if I heard it. We
see nothing of Captain Lovelock, and mamma tells me she has not spoken
of him for two days. She thinks this is a better symptom, but I am
not so sure. Poor Mr. Wright treats it as a great triumph that Blanche
should behave as he foretold. He is welcome to the comfort he can get
out of this, for he certainly gets none from anything else. The society
of your correspondent is not that balm to his spirit which he appeared
to expect, and this in spite of the fact that I have been as gentle and
kind with him as I know how to be. He is very silent--he sometimes
sits for ten minutes without speaking; I assure you it is n't amusing.
Sometimes he looks at me as if he were going to break out with that
crazy idea to which he treated me the other day. But he says nothing,
and then I see that he is not thinking of me--he is simply thinking of
Blanche. The more he thinks of her the better."

"My dear Bernard," she began on another occasion, "I hope you are not
dying of ennui, etc. Over here things are going so-so. He asked me
yesterday to go with him to the Louvre, and we walked about among the
pictures for half an hour. Mamma thinks it a very strange sort of thing
for me to be doing, and though she delights, of all things, in a good
cause, she is not sure that this cause is good enough to justify the
means. I admit that the means are very singular, and, as far as the
Louvre is concerned, they were not successful. We sat and looked for a
quarter of an hour at the great Venus who has lost her arms, and he said
never a word. I think he does n't know what to say. Before we se