s than you and I suspect, or she could not
get on at all.'

* * * * *

'_August_ 16.

'It is almost a week, I see, since I wrote to you last. During that time
we have seen a great deal more of Miss Bretherton, sometimes in company
with her belongings, sometimes without them, and my impressions of her
have ripened very fast. Oh, my dear Eustace, you have been hasty,--all
the world has been hasty! Isabel Bretherton's _real_ self is only now
coming to the front, and it is a self which, as I say to myself with
astonishment, not even your keen eyes have ever seen--hardly suspected
even. Should I, myself a woman, have been as blind to a woman's
capabilities, I wonder? Very likely! These sudden rich developments of
youth are often beyond all calculation.

'Mr. Wallace's attitude makes me realise more than I otherwise could the
past and present condition of things. He comes and talks to me with
amazement of the changes in her tone and outlook, of the girl's
sharpening intellect and growing sensitiveness, and as he recalls
incidents and traits of the London season--confessions or judgments or
blunders of hers, and puts them beside the impression which he sees her
to be making on Paul and myself--I begin to understand from his talk and
his bewilderment something of the real nature of the case.
Intellectually, it has been "the ugly duckling" over again. Under all the
crude, unfledged imperfection of her young performance, you people who
have watched her with your trained critical eyes seem to me never to have
suspected the coming wings, the strange nascent power, which is only now
asserting itself in the light of day.

'"What has Eustace been about?" said Paul to me last night, after we had
all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had
been describing to me his talk with her. "He ought to have seen farther
ahead. That creature is only just beginning to live--and it will be a
life worth having! He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody. Of course
we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant--yes, she is certainly
ignorant,--though not so much as I imagined. But as for natural power and
delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!"

'"I don't know that Eustace did question them," I said; "he thought
simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her,
and never would have because of her popularity."

'To which Paul replied that, a