st's description of a
London street-crowd. There were many other types, as French mothers of
families with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty French
school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with
red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with
white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to
an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced,
spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a moment's pause, but rushed
him instantly through the whole series of Anthony Trollope's novels,
which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every one;
and then she began to find various people astray out of Thackeray. The
trig corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so jauntily, the light
stick carried in one hand, and the broad-sealed official document in the
other, had also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent
missives which Lieutenant Osborne used to send to poor Amelia; a tall,
awkward officer did duty for Major Dobbin; and when a very pretty lady
driving a pony carriage, with a footman in livery on the little perch
behind her, drew rein beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain
in a splendid uniform saluted her and began talking with her in a
languid, affected way, it was Osborne recreant to the thought of his
betrothed, one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his fingers
while he talked.

Most of the people whom she saw passing had letters or papers, and, in
fact, they were coming from the post-office, where the noonday mails had
just been opened. So she went on turning substance into shadow,--unless,
indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion,--and, as I am bound to own,
catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her
sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the
same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been
glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they
rested on the window at which she stood. Then he smiled and lifted his
hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr. Arbuton, while a certain
chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. Till he saw
her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur in his bearing, that
the trepidation which she had felt about him at times, the day before,
and which had worn quite away under the events of the morning, was
renewed again, and the aspec