d in pecuniary ways, excessively nasty to him. His father
wouldn't last for ever--quite the contrary; and he knew how thoroughly,
in spite of her youth, her beauty and the swarm of her admirers, some of
them positively threatening in their passion, he could trust her to hold
out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages too,
but she liked her "little viscount" just as he was, and liked to think
that, bullied and persecuted, he had her there so luxuriously to rest
upon. She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be
or mightn't. I never met my pretty model in the world--she moved, it
appeared, in exalted circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of
illustration, the grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and
she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, revelations of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway-carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to
gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction
through the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only
one of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had
run after him. Dawling hilariously explained that when one wished very
much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition which
led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn't in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn't have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if
she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in Paris, many accidents might have happened.

V

I had been