f cries
of sympathetic delight. "Why, you have got all the books I ever want to
read again!" she exclaimed. "What wonderful people you are! How have you
done it--in Zion Place?"

"I suppose the books must have been blown here," answered Theophil,
gaily, "on the same fair wind that blew Miss Isabel Strange."

"Yes," said little Jenny, affectionately pressing her shoulder as the
three leaned forward looking at the shelves, "for if we seem wonderful
people to you, what must you seem to us--here, as you may well say, in
Zion Place?"

"What _does_ she remind you of?" said Jenny presently, with candid
admiration. "I know! Why, of course, she just _is_ the very woman.
Wait--I'll go and fetch it;" and Theophil and Isabel were thus left for
a moment or two alone,--a fact of no importance beyond this, that it was
the first moment in their lives that they had ever been together alone.

Jenny returned presently with a small copy of Botticelli's "Primavera,"
which hung in her bedroom; and it was undoubtedly true that the figure
of Flora might well have passed for a portrait of Isabel. The nose was a
little longer, that was all; but the rest of the face--particularly the
eyes and mouth--was all but exact, and the general correspondence
between the two faces in subtlety, strangeness, and, so to say,
determined refinement, was complete.

"It is strange that I should have loved that face so," said Jenny.

"It is very sweet of you,--Jenny, I had almost said,--but you are too
kind to me, and a little selfish too--you give me no time to admire you.
I wonder if Mr. Londonderry is modern enough to allow ladies to smoke in
his study."

And thus it comes out that Jenny often smoked there!

The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli,
and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that
sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance.
At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an
ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are
beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the
_bourgeoisie_. So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.

A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is
seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood
up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were
instantaneously attracted. She stood very simply, with one hand lig