able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit
him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more
indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me
that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances.
These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak
liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious
fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise.
He was not a woman's poet, as I had said to Mrs. Prest, in the modern
phase of his reputation; but the situation had been different when
the man's own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every
testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. "Orpheus and the
Maenads!" was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned
over his correspondence. Almost all the Maenads were unreasonable, and
many of them insupportable; it struck me in short that he was kinder,
more considerate than, in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a
place!) I should have been.

It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take
up space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all these other
lines of research we had to deal with phantoms and dust, the mere echoes
of echoes, the one living source of information that had lingered
on into our time had been unheeded by us. Every one of Aspern's
contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away; we had not
been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked
or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched.
Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she alone had
survived. We exhausted in the course of months our wonder that we had
not found her out sooner, and the substance of our explanation was that
she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had had reason for
doing so. But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so
quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century--the age of
newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had
taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away
in an undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of
exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was
that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she.
And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown for example in