a friend whom fate had
distinguished in the same weird way as herself I put her quite at
liberty to say "Oh, bring him out to see me!" I should probably have
been able to bring him, and a situation perfectly innocent or at any
rate comparatively simple would have been created. But she uttered no
such word; she only said: "I must meet him certainly; yes, I shall look
out for him!" That caused the first delay, and meanwhile various things
happened. One of them was that as time went on she made, charming as
she was, more and more friends, and that it regularly befell that
these friends were sufficiently also friends of his to bring him up in
conversation. It was odd that without belonging, as it were, to the same
world or, according to the horrid term, the same set, my baffled pair
should have happened in so many cases to fall in with the same people
and make them join in the funny chorus. She had friends who didn't know
each other but who inevitably and punctually recommended _him_. She had
also the sort of originality, the intrinsic interest that led her to be
kept by each of us as a kind of private resource, cultivated jealously,
more or less in secret, as a person whom one didn't meet in society,
whom it was not for every one--whom it was not for the vulgar--to
approach, and with whom therefore acquaintance was particularly
difficult and particularly precious. We saw her separately, with
appointments and conditions, and found it made on the whole for harmony
not to tell each other. Somebody had always had a note from her still
later than somebody else. There was some silly woman who for a long
time, among the unprivileged, owed to three simple visits to Richmond
a reputation for being intimate with "lots of awfully clever
out-of-the-way people."

Every one has had friends it has seemed a happy thought to bring
together, and every one remembers that his happiest thoughts have not
been his greatest successes; but I doubt if there was ever a case in
which the failure was in such direct proportion to the quantity of
influence set in motion. It is really perhaps here the quantity of
influence that was most remarkable. My lady and gentleman each declared
to me and others that it was like the subject of a roaring farce. The
reason first given had with time dropped-out of sight and fifty better
ones flourished on top of it. They were so awfully alike: they had the
same ideas and tricks and tastes, the same prejudices and super