elp her
to come back," returned Tims, getting snappish.

"Alas! I fear you would, Tims, dear, in spite of knowing it would only
make her miserable. That shows, doesn't it, how unreasonable even a
distinguished scientific woman can be?"

This aspersion on Tims's reasoning powers had to be resented and the
resentment to be soothed. And the soothing was so effectually done that
Tims owned to herself afterwards there was some excuse for Ian's
infatuation.

But Tims had no desire to meddle, and the months passed by without any
symptoms of the change appearing. It seemed as if Mildred's hold upon
life had never been so firm, the power of her personality never so fully
developed. She belonged to a large family which in all its branches had
a trick of throwing up successful men and brilliant women. But in
reaction against Scottish clannishness, it held little together, and in
the two houses whence Mildred was launched on her London career, she
had no nursery reputation of Milly's with which to contend.

One of these houses was that of her cousin, Sir Cyril Meres, a
fashionable painter with a considerable gift for art, and more for
success--success social and financial. His beautiful house, stored with
wonderful collections, had a reputation, and was frequented by every one
of distinction in the artistic or intellectual world--by those of the
world of wealth and rank who were interested in such matters, and the
yet larger number who affected to be interested in them. For those
Anglo-Saxon deities, Mammon and Snobbery, who have since conquered the
whole civilized globe, had temporarily fallen back for a fresh spring,
and in the eighties and early nineties Culture was reckoned very nearly
as _chic_ as motoring in the first years of the new century.

Several painters of various degrees of talent attempted to fix on canvas
the extraordinary charm of Mrs. Stewart's appearance. Not one of them
succeeded; but the peculiar shade of her hair, the low forehead and
delicate line of the dark eyebrows, the outline of the mask, sometimes
admired, sometimes criticised, made her portrait always recognized,
whether simpering as a chocolate-box classicality, smiling sadly from
the flowery circle of the Purgatorio, or breaking out of some rough mass
of paint with the provocative leer of a _cocotte_ of the Quartier Latin.

The magnetism of her personality defied analysis, as her essential
beauty defied the painter's art. It was a magnetism wh