'I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago but two subjects--Jamaica and the stage--the latter taken in a somewhat narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her mind and Mrs. Stuart's more frequently into contact with each other. But I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton. Her strong womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical delight in the girl's beauty, and the little personal pride and excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the season. It is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her in the best light. Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in her turn evidently admires enormously her friend's social capabilities and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs. Stuart's kindness--an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest complaisance towards all the Stuarts' friends, and in a constant watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.
'However, here I am as usual wasting time in analysis instead of describing to you our Sunday. It was one of those heavenly days with which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty. We found a carriage waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region in some virgin continent. On either hand the gorse was thick and golden, great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist grass beneath, and over the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose into the sky in masses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle of white set in the environing blue.