The Author of Beltraffio .....................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER I .............................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER II ............................................................................................................................................7

CHAPTER III........................................................................................................................................13

CHAPTER IV........................................................................................................................................19

Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction three weeks in my pocketbook. I was

nervous and timid about meeting himconscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented

by strangers, and especially by my countrypeople, and not exempt from the suspicion that he had the

irritability as well as the dignity of genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occurfor I could scarcely

believe it was near at handwould be so great that I wished to think of it in advance, to feel it there against

my breast, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual. In the little game of new sensations that

I was playing with my ingenuous mind I wished to keep my visit to the author of "Beltraffio" as a

trumpcard. It was three years after the publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over five times

and which now, with my riper judgement, I admire on the whole as much as ever. This will give you about

the date of my first visitof any durationto England for you will not have forgotten the commotion, I may

even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient's masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that

had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic warcry. People had endeavoured to sail

nearer to "truth" in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet been,

among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution and "intimate" importance of theme. Nothing

had been done in that line from the point of view of art for art. That served me as a fond formula, I may

mention, when I was twentyfive; how much it still serves I won't take upon myself to sayespecially as the

discerning reader will be able to judge for himself. I had been in England, briefly, a twelvemonth before the

time to which I began by alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands was making

a considerable tour in the East; so that there was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London

again. It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England and was, with her little boy, their

only child, spending the period of her husband's absencea good many monthsat a small place they had

down in Surrey. They had a house in London, but actually in the occupation of other persons. All this I had

picked up, and also that Mrs. Ambient was charmingmy friend the American poet, from whom I had my

introduction, had never seen her, his relations with the great man confined to the exchange of letters; but she

wasn't, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of "Beltraffio," and I didn't go down into

Surrey to call on her. I went to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and returned to London in

May. My visit to Italy had opened my eyes to a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty of

certain pages in the works of Mark Ambient. I carried his productions about in my trunkthey are not, as

you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to "Beltraffio" by, some exquisite thingsand I used to read

them over in the evening at the inn. I used profoundly to reason that the man who drew those characters and

wrote that style understood what he saw and knew what he was doing. This is my sole ground for mentioning

my winter in Italy. He had been there much in former yearshe was saturated with what painters call the

"feeling" of that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hillcities of Tuscany, the look of certain

lonely grassgrown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he

understood the spirit of the Renaissance; he understood everything. The scene of one of his earlier novels was

laid in Rome, the scene of another in Florence, and I had moved through these cities in company with the

figures he set so firmly on their feet. This is why I was now so much happier even than before in the prospect

At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I despatched to him the missive of the American

poet. He had already gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London "season" and it was his habit

to migrate on the first of June. Moreover I had heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which

some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet days.

That knowledge, however, didn't prevent mecet age est sans pitiefrom sending with my friend's letter a

note of my own, in which I asked his leave to come down and see him for an hour or two on some day to be

named by himself. My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression of my sentiments, and the

effect of the entire appeal was to elicit from the great man the kindest possible invitation. He would be

delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following Saturday and would remain till the

Monday morning. We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the other

great man, the one in America. He indicated to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on the

Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo. He carried his benevolence to the point of coming to meet me

at the little station at which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face,

surmounted with a soft wideawake and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined on my

mantelshelf, scanning the carriagewindows as the train rolled up. He recognised me as infallibly as I had

recognised himself; he appeared to know by instinct how a young American of critical pretensions, rash

youth, would look when much divided between eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand and smiled

at me and said: "You must beaYOU, I think!" and asked if I should mind going on foot to his house,

which would take but a few minutes. I remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should

give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact

quite transported, when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.

I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had indeed instantly, seen him as all

delightful. His face is so well known that I needn't describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman

and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination. There was a brush of the Bohemian in his

fineness; you would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild. He was addicted to velvet jackets,

to cigarettes, to loose shirtcollars, to looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not

perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of

his expression. There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have

seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and

the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued

countenance. He affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent. He had

evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his obvious

future? He was just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank.

He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small

spasms of the selfconsciousness that is an Englishman's last and dearest treasurethe thing he pays his way

through life by sacrificing small pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in "Quentin Durward"

broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been thirtyeight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was

published. He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last

news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very

form of his questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as if I were somehow myself having the use of

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and

curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in

creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the preRaphaelites. That was

the way many things struck me at that time, in Englandas reproductions of something that existed

primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these

things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark

Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if it hadn't been a cottage it must

have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home. But

it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scaleand

might besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci. It nestled under a cluster of

magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables,

and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being painted in watercolours and inhabited by people whose

lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the gardenwalls

of incalculable height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. "My wife must be

somewhere about," Mark Ambient said as we went in. "We shall find her perhapswe've about an hour

We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have called them, which extended into the

rear. They covered scarce three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked and full of traces

of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little flights of stepsmossy and cracked were

thesewhich connected the different parts with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated,

were muffled in the great verdurous screens. They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the further

end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently made out from afar a little group. "Ah there she is!"

said Mark Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He noted that last fact in a slightly different tone from any in

which he yet had spoken. I wasn't fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I afterwards

"Yes, my only child. He's always in his mother's pocket. She coddles him too much." It came back to me

afterwards toothe sound of these critical words. They weren't petulant; they expressed rather a sudden

coldness, a mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and then he stopped short and called the

"Dolcino, come and see your daddy!" There was something in the way he stood still and waited that made me

think he did it for a purpose. Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child's waist, and he was leaning against

her knee; but though he moved at his father's call she gave no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a

neighbour, was seated near her, and before them was a gardentable on which a tea service had been placed.

Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal embrace; but, too tightly held, he after two

or three fruitless efforts jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother's lap. There was a certain

awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs. Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I

wouldn't for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect

of our having tea in the garden. "Ah she won't let him come!" said my host with a sigh; and we went our way

till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned my name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as "My

dear," very genially, without a trace of resentment at her detention of the child. The quickness of the

transition made me vaguely ask myself if he were perchance henpeckeda shocking surmise which I

instantly dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected him to have; slim and fair,

with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and practised

in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous

redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a vague air of race,

justified by my afterwards learning that she was "connected with the aristocracy." I have seen poets married

to women of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancywomen with dull

faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious

disparity in Mark Ambient's union. My hostessso far as she could be called sodelicate and quiet, in a

white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as

"Beltraffio." Round her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down

her back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of her little boy. Her smooth shining hair

was confined in a net. She gave me an adequate greeting, and DolcinoI thought this small name of

endearment delightfultook advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who

seized him in silence and held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.

I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He

had the face of an angelthe eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than mortal bloom. There was

something that deeply touched, that almost alarmed, in his beauty, composed, one would have said, of

elements too fine and pure for the breath of this world. When I spoke to him and he came and held out his

hand and smiled at me I felt a sudden strange pity for himquite as if he had been an orphan or a changeling

or stamped with some social stigma. It was impossible to be in fact more exempt from these misfortunes, and

yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from murmuring all tenderly "Poor little devil!" though why one

should have applied this epithet to a living cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards indeed I knew a trifle

better; I grasped the truth of his being too fair to live, wondering at the same time that his parents shouldn't

have guessed it and have been in proportionate grief and despair. For myself I had no doubt of his

evanescence, having already more than once caught in the fact the particular infant charm that's as good as a

The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy personage in velveteen and limp feathers,

whom I guessed to be the vicar's wifeour hostess didn't introduce meand who immediately began to talk

to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in

seeing the author of "Beltraffio" even in such superficial communion with the Church of England. His

writings implied so much detachment from that institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so

independent and so little likely in general to be thought edifying, that I should have expected to find him an

object of horror to vicars and their ladiesof horror repaid on his own part by any amount of effortless

derision. This proved how little I knew as yet of the English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping

up their forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient's hearth and home. I found afterwards

that he had, in his study, between nervous laughs and free cigarpuffs, some wonderful comparisons for his

clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, he and the vicaress were

equally attached to them, and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting plant. The

lady's visit, however, had presumably been long, and she presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs.

Ambient. Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.

"Stay with me, darling," Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had surrendered himself to his father.

Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked at her in shy appeal, "Can't I go with

"I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, dearest." And Mrs. Ambient, who had seated herself again,

Her husband stopped, his back turned to her, but without releasing the child. He was still talking to the

vicaress, but this good lady, I think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs. Ambient and at

Dolcino, and then looked at me, smiling in a highly amused cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.

"He's very tiredhe has run about all day. He ought to be quiet till he goes to bed. Otherwise he won't

sleep." These declarations fell successively and very distinctly from Mrs. Ambient's lips.

Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked at him in silence. The vicaress gave a

genial irrelevant laugh and observed that he was a precious little pet. "Let him choose," said Mark Ambient.

"Papa, I don't think I can choose," the child answered, making his voice very low and confidential. "But I've

"And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you HAVE chosen!" On which Mark Ambient walked off

with his son, accompanied by reechoing but inarticulate comments from my fellowvisitor.

His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the ground, expressed for a few moments so

much mute agitation that anything I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she none the less

quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently civil hope that I didn't mind having had to walk from the

station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on: "We've got a thing that might have gone for you, but

my husband wouldn't order it." After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that the

pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: "I

She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes. "I suppose your distances are so great."

"Yes, but we break our marches! I can't tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here," I added. "I've the

"Oh yes, I've seen some of them," she dropped, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision

were before her at the moment. It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I

guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with the author of "Beltraffio." I thought

the fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn't think it important it only made me

"For me, you know," I returneddoubtless with a due suffisance "he's quite the greatest of living writers."

"Of course I can't judge. Of course he's very clever," she said with a patient cheer.

"He's nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing

them with the greatest things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and

apparently to find the man as delightful as the artistwell, I can't tell you how much too good to be true it

seems and how great a privilege I think it." I knew I was gushing, but I couldn't help it, and what I said was a

good deal less than what I felt. I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so much as this to the master

himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact that,

as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little compressed,

listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard

it frequently enough and couldn't treat it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that I

was so young as to expose myself to being called forwardan imputation and a word I had always loathed;

as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. "I assure you that for me

She didn't take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said abruptly and a trifle dryly: "We're very much

My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled gardenwalls, where plumtrees and pears, flattened and fastened

upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms. "Doesn't it promise well?"

Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her

husband's return with the child. "Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?" it occurred to me to ask, irresistibly

impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.

"Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It's a lovely old place," I continued. "The whole

impression's that of certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his pictures."

She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. "It's a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it."

"Oh it has his TONE," I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my

companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.

It was clear I insisted too much. "His tone?" she repeated with a harder look at me and a slightly heightened

"Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don't in the least consider that I'm living in one of his books at all. I shouldn't

care for that in the least," she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really

sharp protest into an insincere joke. "I'm afraid I'm not very literary. And I'm not artistic," she stated.

"I'm very sure you're not ignorant, not stupid," I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling

immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the sense

that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had thrust forward her limitations.

"Well, whatever I am I'm very different from my husband. If you like him you won't like me. You needn't say

She looked as if she hadn't heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without

further speech. Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without

unrest. But at last she spokeshe asked me if there seemed many people in town. I gave her what

satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that

"Doesn't he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn't find the proper quiet for his work. I should think his

things had been written for the most part in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness following on a

kind of tumult. Don't you think so?" I laboured on. "I suppose London's a tremendous place to collect

impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better for working them up. Does he get many of

his impressions in London, should you say?" I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry simply

because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I

pausedI've not represented my pausesshe simply continued to let her eyes wander while her long fair

fingers played with the medallion on her neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say

something, and what she said was that she hadn't the least idea where her husband got his impressions. This

made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically fine

as she sat there. But I must either have lost that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further

aggression, for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look

for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged. I've every reason now to know that she found me

She gave a strange small laugh as she said: "I'm afraid you think I know much more about my husband's

work than I do. I haven't the least idea what he's doing," she then added in a slightly different, that is a more

explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the enormity of her confession. "I don't read what he writes."

She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in making this seem to me anything less

than monstrous. I stared at her and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you admire

She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't speak, I could see, the first words that

rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh of course he's very clever!" And

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few words with her husband that I didn't

hear and that ended in her taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house. Her husband

joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and constrained, and said that if I would

come in with him he would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it

important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out

the signs of things mastered only afterwards. This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes me

forget that, at least on the occasion of my present referenceI mean that first afternoonMark Ambient

struck me as only enviable. Allowing for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back

to the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small son.

He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm. "Oh don't call him that, or you'llyou'll!"

But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise. Immediately afterwards, however, he

I declared that I wouldn't for the world take any liberties with his little futureit seemed to me to hang by

"You Americans are very keen," he commented on this. "You notice more things than we do."

"Ah if you want visitors who aren't struck with you," I cried, "you shouldn't have asked me down here!"

He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where the light was green, and before

he left me said irrelevantly: "As for my small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us before

we've done with him!" And he made this assertion as if he really believed it, without any appearance of jest,

"You had better give him to me to keep for you," I said. "Let me remove the apple of discord!"

It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being perfectly serious. "It would be quite the best

But he lingered with his hands in his pockets. I felt as if within a few moments I had, morally speaking, taken

several steps nearer to him. He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if there

were something one might do for him. I was terribly conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I

wondered what such a service might be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only thing I could do for him

was to like him. I suppose he guessed this and was grateful for what was in my mind, since he went on

presently: "I haven't the advantage of being an American, but I also notice a little, and I've an idea

that"here he smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder"even counting out your nationality you're not

destitute of intelligence. I've only known you half an hour, but!" For which again he pulled up. "You're

"But you may treat me as if I could understand you!" I said; and before he left me to dress for dinner he had

When I went down into the drawingroomI was very punctualI found that neither my hostess nor my

host had appeared. A lady rose from a sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at

her. "I daresay you don't know me," she said with the modern laugh. "I'm Mark Ambient's sister." Whereupon

I shook hands with her, saluting her very low. Her laugh was modernby which I mean that it consisted of

the vocal agitation serving between people who meet in drawingrooms as the solvent of social disparities,

the medium of transitions; but her appearance waswhat shall I call it?medieval. She was pale and

angular, her long thin face was inhabited by sad dark eyes and her black hair intertwined with golden fillets

and curious clasps. She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when she moved and was "cut," as to the

neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to

Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct,

that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded

that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that

reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked

together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness

which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer. She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I

was never more than half to penetrate her motives and mysteries. Of one thing I'm sure at least: that they

were considerably less insuperable than her appearance announced. Miss Ambient was a restless romantic

disappointed spinster, consumed with the love of MichaelAngelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I'm

now convinced she hadn't in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her,

seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features in especial had a

misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which

was certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a young lady could scarce have

been so dejected and disillusioned without having committed a crime for which she was consumed with

remorse, or having parted with a hope that she couldn't sanely have entertained. She had, I believe, the usual

allowance of rather vain motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she wished to be

It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of Ambient's name, but I shall have still less

gracious things to say before I've finished my anecdote, and moreoverI confess itI owe the young lady a

bit of a grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic

development, had little real intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her brother's renown, and as there

were plenty of people who darkly disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person formed

by his influence. It was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had almost compromised him with

the world at large. He was the original and she the inevitable imitation. I suppose him scarce aware of the

impression she mainly produced, beyond having a general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti; he

was used to her and was sorry for her, wishing she would marry and observing how she didn't. Doubtless I

take her too seriously, for she did me no harm, though I'm bound to allow that I can only halfaccount for

her. She wasn't so mystical as she looked, but was a strange indirect uncomfortable embarrassing woman. My

story gives the reader at best so very small a knot to untie that I needn't hope to excite his curiosity by

delaying to remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her sister inlaw. This I learned but later on, when other

matters came to my knowledge. I mention it, however, at once, for I shall perhaps not seem to count too

much on having beguiled him if I say he must promptly have guessed it. Mrs. Ambient, a person of

conscience, put the best face on her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a year; but it took no great

insight to recognise the very different personal paste of the two ladies, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies

would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort. Mrs. Ambient, smoothhaired, thinlipped,

perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself

so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more farfetched note in her

It was in a garment and with an expression of this kind that she made her entrance after I had exchanged a

few words with Miss Ambient. Her husband presently followed her and, there being no other company, we

went to dinner. The impressions I received at that repast are present to me still. The elements of oddity in the

air hovered, as it were, without descendingto any immediate check of my delight. This came mainly, of

course, from Ambient's talk, the easiest and richest I had ever heard. I mayn't say today whether he laid

himself out to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but that matters littleit seemed so natural

to him to shine. His spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm almost beyond his written; that is if

the high finish of his printed prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault. There was such a

kindness in him, however, that I've no doubt it gave him ideas for me, or about me, to see me sit as

openmouthed as I now figure myself. Not so the two ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from

beginning to end of the meal, but who hadn't even the air of being struck with such an exhibition of fancy and

taste. Mrs. Ambient, detached, and inscrutable, met neither my eye nor her husband's; she attended to her

dinner, watched her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide intervals a remark with

her sisterinlaw and, while she slowly rubbed her lean white hands between the courses, looked out of the

window at the first signs of eveningthe long June day allowing us to dine without candles. Miss Ambient

appeared to give little direct heed to anything said by her brother; but on the other hand she was much

engaged in watching its effect upon me. Her "dieaway" pupils continued to attach themselves to my

countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to another century that kept them from being importunate.

She seemed to look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished for me the inconvenience. It

was as if she knew in a general way that he must be talking very well, but she herself was so at home among

such allusions that she had no need to pick them up and was at liberty to see what would become of the

The temperature was aesthetic certainly, but it was less so than I could have desired, for I failed of any great

success in making our friend abound about himself. I tried to put him on the ground of his own genius, but he

slipped through my fingers every time and shifted the saddle to one or other of his contemporaries. He talked

about Balzac and Browning, about what was being done in foreign countries, about his recent tour in the East

and the extraordinary forms of life to be observed in that part of the world. I felt he had reasons for holding

off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full consistency or sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with

certain social topics, treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due play of that power of ironic

evocation in which his books abound. He had a deal to say about London as London appears to the observer

who has the courage of some of his conclusions during the highpressure timefrom April to Julyof its

gregarious life. He flashed his faculty of playing with the caught image and liberating the wistful idea over

the whole scheme of manners or conception of intercourse of his compatriots, among whom there were

evidently not a few types for which he had little love. London in short was grotesque to him, and he made

capital sport of it; his only allusion that I can remember to his own work was his saying that he meant some

day to do an immense and general, a kind of epic, social satire. Miss Ambient's perpetual gaze seemed to put

to me: "Do you perceive how artistic, how very strange and interesting, we are? Frankly now is it possible to

be MORE artistic, MORE strange and interesting, than this? You surely won't deny that we're remarkable." I

was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and

moreover, of course, I couldn't see my way toat all geniallyinclude Mrs. Ambient. Yet there was no

doubt they were, taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never been left, or

After the ladies had retired my host took me into his study to smoke, where I appealingly brought him round,

or so tried, to some disclosure of fond ideals. I was bent on proving I was worthy to listen to him, on repaying

him for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly I understood. He liked to talk;

he liked to defend his convictions and his honour (not that I attacked them); he liked a little perhapsit was

a pardonable weaknessto bewilder the youthful mind even while wishing to win it over. My ingenuous

sympathy received at any rate a shock from three or four of his professionshe made me occasionally gasp

and stare. He couldn't help forgetting, or rather couldn't know, how little, in another and drier clime, I had

ever sat in the school in which he was master; and he promoted me as at a jump to a sense of its penetralia.

My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that

they passed away too quickly; since I found that for the main points I was essentially, I was quite

constitutionally, on Mark Ambient's "side." This was the taken stand of the artist to whom every

manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve his

experience of life into a literary form. On that high head of the passion for form the attempt at perfection, the

quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grailhe said the most interesting, the most

inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had

known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all

periods, the Italian cinque cento. It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half his thought, and

that what he had kept back from motives I deplored when I made them out laterwas the finer and braver

part. It was his fate to make a great many still more "prepared" people than me not inconsiderably wince; but

there was no grain of bravado in his ripest things (I've always maintained it, though often contradicted), and

at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his fingertips and regarding imperfection not only as an aesthetic

but quite also as a social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are critics who regret that having

gone so far he didn't go further; but I regret nothingputting aside two or three of the motives I just

mentioned since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don't see how you can go beyond that. The hours I spent

in his studythis first one and the few that followed it; they were not, after all, so numerousseem to glow,

as I look back on them, with a tone that is partly that of the brown old room, rich, under the shaded

candlelight where we sat and smoked, with the dusky delicate bindings of valuable books; partly that of his

voice, of which I still catch the echo, charged with the fancies and figures that came at his command. When

we went back to the drawingroom we found Miss Ambient alone in possession and prompt to mention that

her sisterinlaw had a quarter of an hour before been called by the nurse to see the child, who appeared

"Feverish! how in the world comes he to be feverish?" Ambient asked. "He was perfectly right this

"Beatrice must be very happyshe has an opportunity to triumph!" said my friend with a bright bitterness

"Surely not if the child's ill," I ventured to remark by way of pleading for Mrs. Ambient.

"My dear fellow, you aren't marriedyou don't know the nature of wives!" my host returned with spirit.

"Beatrice is perfect as a mother," sighed Miss Ambient quite tremendously and with her fingers interlaced on

"I shall go up and see my boy," her brother went on." Do you suppose he's asleep?"

"Beatrice won't let you see him, dear"as to which our young lady looked at me, though addressing our

"Damn her point of view!" cried the author of "Beltraffio." And he left the room; after which we heard him

I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally had some exchange of remarks, which

began, I think, by my asking her what the point of view of her sisterinlaw could be.

"Oh it's so very odd. But we're so very odd altogether. Don't you find us awfully unlike others of our

class?which indeed mostly, in England, is awful. We've lived so much abroad. I adore 'abroad.' Have you

"You're not all alike, you interesting threeor, counting Dolcino, foursurely, surely; so that I don't think I

understand your question. We've no one like your brotherI may go so far as that."

"Oh yesoh yes. Well," said my entertainer, "she doesn't like his ideas. She doesn't like them for the child.

Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient's arcana I was particularly in a position

to appreciate this announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a moment, burst into

laughter which I instantly checked when I remembered the indisposed child above and the possibility of

"What has that infant to do with ideas?" I asked. "Surely he can't tell one from another. Has he read his

"He's very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss

Ambient's head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came

a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious

insincere grimace, and she added "When one has children what one writes becomes a great responsibility."

"Children are terrible critics," I prosaically answered. "I'm really glad I haven't any."

"Do you also write, then? And in the same style as my brother? And do you like that style? And do people

appreciate it in America? I don't write, but I think I feel." To these and various other inquiries and

observations my young lady treated me till we heard her brother's step in the hall again and Mark Ambient

reappeared. He was so flushed and grave that I supposed he had seen something symptomatic in the condition

of his child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him from afaras if he had been a burning

"No, but I'm disappointed. She won't let me in. She has locked the door, and I'm afraid to make a noise." I

daresay there might have been a touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my new friend so

much that it took nothing for me from his dignity. "She tells mefrom behind the doorthat she'll let me

I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it's possible he read that my pity for him was untinged with

contempt, though I scarce know why he should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and took

her bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his study. We sat there till after midnight; he put

himself into his slippers and an old velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he talked considerably less

than before. There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in

intimacy. They helped me further to understand my friend's personal situation and to imagine it by no means

the happiest possible. When his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase of

interestif that was all that was wanted!that for him too life was the same struggle it had been for so

many another man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some

of the sheets of his forthcoming bookwhich, though unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to

writers of deliberation, of having "set up," from chapter to chapter, as he advanced. These early pages, the

premices, in the language of letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my room and look

over at my leisure. I was in the act of leaving him when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs.

Ambient stood before us. She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and then said to her husband

that as she supposed he hadn't gone to bed she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and

would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the

doorway, as if for fear she might seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself of his

child's condition. She looked so frankly discomfited that I for a moment believed her about to give him chase.

But she resigned herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray, to the lamplit room

where various books at which I had been looking were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes

of tobacco hung in midair. I bade her goodnight and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, a

perversity that had already made me address her overmuch on that question of her husband's powers, I

alluded to the precious proofsheets with which Ambient had entrusted me and which I nursed there under

my arm. "They're the opening chapters of his new book," I said. "Fancy my satisfaction at being allowed to

She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the hall; but before we separated,

thinking it apparently a good occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would seem, to be

quite "thick" with my hostthat there was no fitness in my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case;

before we separated, I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine wellbred inveterate curtness: "I daresay

you attribute to me ideas I haven't got. I don't take that sort of interest in my husband's proofsheets. I

I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found strolling in the garden before

breakfast. The whole place looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the

housemaids had been turned into it with their dust pans and featherbrushes. I almost hesitated to light a

cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had,

at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me. She might have been posing for her

photograph. Her sadcoloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked

themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on a cinquecento ruff. The first thing I did after

bidding her goodmorning was to ask her for news of her little nephewto express the hope she had heard

he was better. She was able to gratify this trustshe spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day.

We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother's household, which

offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so startled and distressed me with the night

"She doesn't usually come out with that so soon!" Miss Ambient returned in answer to my breathlessness.

"Yes, she won't like you for that. But you mustn't mind, if the rest of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of

art ought to have a 'purpose.' But she's a charming womandon't you think her charming? I find in her quite

"She's very beautiful," I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that

Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me her

brother and his wife had no other difference but thisone that she thought his writings immoral and his

influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I answered that it was in

all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman's regarding her husband's mind as a well of corruption, and she

seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark. "But there hasn't been any of the sort of trouble that

there so often is among married people," she said. "I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn't at

allwell, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people

either. You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn't. All the same of course, from her point of view,

you know, she has a dread of my brother's influence on the child on the formation of his character, his 'ideals,'

poor little brat, his principles. It's as if it were a subtle poison or a contagionsomething that would rub off

on his tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee. If she could she'd prevent Mark

from even so much as touching him. Every one knows itvisitors see it for themselves; so there's no harm in

my telling you. Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously

moralso a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget," my companion added,

a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas arewell, reallyrather

I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding The Observer at the

breakfasttable, that none of them were probably quite so "impossible, don't you know?" as his sister. Mrs.

Ambient, a little "the worse," as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn't

appear at breakfast. Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to church. I afterwards learnt that

she did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should accompany her. It was while the

churchbell droned near at hand that the author of "Beltraffio" led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of

in his note. I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we saw. We kept to the fields and

copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep,

whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but part of the

general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and

with all nature bleating and braying for the violence. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's

visitorfrom the big bandylegged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the tones of green as they

wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy

approach and a pictorial signfrom these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a

gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious

of an individual profile. I admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint hued heather, and I was for ever

stopping to say how charming I thought the threadlike footpaths across the fields, which wandered in a

diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly goodnatured and

was as much struck, dear man, with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the

landscape. We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts

across a park or two where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we

skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a

heathery hillside where if the sun wasn't too hot neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay

beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I had already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the

"I'm not without hope of being able to make it decent enough," he said as I went back to the subject while we

turned up our heels to the sky. "At least the people who dislike my stuffand there are plenty of them, I

believewill dislike this thing (if it does turn out well) most." This was the first time I had heard him allude

to the people who couldn't read hima class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of the

man of letters. A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had the normal

proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous

development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. I won't therefore go so far as to

say that he never thought of his detractors or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his

admirershe could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular, but I at least then

judged (and had occasion to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of

thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them,

and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally

vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them overthe newspapersnight and day; the only

point I make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't strike one as a man actively on his

guard. I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his

books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs incontestably to "Beltraffio," in spite of the beauty of

certain parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had at the moment of which I speak no sense of

having declined; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I

suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his result grow like

the crescent of the young moon and promise to fill the disk. "I want to be truer than I've ever been," he said,

settling himself on his back with his hands clasped behind his head; "I want to give the impression of life

itself. No, you may say what you will, I've always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down

and rounded them off and tucked them indone everything to them that life doesn't do. I've been a slave to

"All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in

'Natalina,' for instance, which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing's ignobleI blush when

I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh

how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so

smooth; I don't do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop

of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever

catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It

takes ever so long to believe it. You don't know yet, my dear youth. It isn't till one has been watching her

some forty years that one finds out half of what she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably

contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real

enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one's cynicism, the situation has elements of

the ludicrous which the poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one

else. Of course one mustn't worry about the bonnes gens," Mark Ambient went on while my thoughts

"To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people look into itthat's what your work

"Ah polishing one's platethat's the torment of execution!" he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting

forward. "The effort to arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort necessarysome people

don't, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one

with which I've to content myself. Life's really too short for artone hasn't time to make one's shell ideally

hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to saythe devilish thing has a way sometimes of being

bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with

my knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible sandy stretches where I've taken the wrong

turn because I couldn't for the life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes! Such

"Very bad? They're the highest social offence I know; it oughtit absolutely ought; I'm quite seriousto be

capital. If I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word. The people who

can'tsome of them don't so much as know it when they see itwould shut their inkstands, and we

I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to explain just how it was that, every

moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative

spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material. I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it

was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of

intimacy with him that I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife's

having onceor perhaps more than onceasked him whether he should like Dolcino to read "Beltraffio."

He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this conveyed to meas well doubtless of my extreme

curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read ALL his

workswhen he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would

"And meanwhile do you propose to hide themto lock them up in a drawer?" Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.

"Oh nowe must simply tell him they're not intended for small boys. If you bring him up properly after that

To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when he was about fifteen, say; and I

asked her husband if it were his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn't read novels.

"Good onescertainly not!" said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that

for myself I wasn't sure it was bad for them if the novels were "good" to the right intensity of goodness. "Bad

for THEM, I don't say so much!" my companion returned. "But very bad, I'm afraid, for the poor dear old

novel itself." That oblique accidental allusion to his wife's attitude was followed by a greater breadth of

reference as we walked home. "The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways

of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of

common household, since the beginning of time. They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell

you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds

sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the difference between making the

most of life and making the least, so that you'll get another better one in some other time and place. Will it be

a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well

as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beautyI don't know, I doubt if a poor devil CAN; I delight in

it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn't

cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves. She's always afraid of it, always on her

guard. I don't know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides. And

she's so pretty, too, herself! Don't you think she's lovely? She was at any rate when we married. At that time I

wasn't aware of that difference I speak of I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.

Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don't know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they

are; that's the way I try to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs. Ambient about

"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a positionthanks to

Miss Ambientto be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown visibly that he

wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he didn't; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched

He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired

overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the

artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this

particular cat out of the bag. "She thinks me immoralthat's the long and short of it," he said as we paused

outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive

perceptive eyesthe eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual

Englishmanviewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. "It's very

strange when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She's a

very nice woman, extraordinarily wellbehaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense

about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novelshe has explained it to me once or twice, and she

doesn't do it badly as expositionis a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so

dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears

burn. It's two different ways of looking at the whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate. "And they're

irreconcilable!" he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, halfway to the door,

he stopped and said to me: "If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand;

it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literatureI mean of the

genuine kinds. Oh the shamsthose they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked up at the charming house, with

its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I

should never have expected to find them there. "Ah it doesn't matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed;

which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful; strangely delightful considering that the

difference between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by his manner, by

his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs.

Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I watched her at table for further

illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united

revelations of her sisterinlaw and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage.

Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after

a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as

in themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as possible;

but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been (for there are

guardianspirits, I suppose, of all great principles) the very angel of the pink of proprietyputting the pink

for a principle, though I'd rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had

simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what. He had been right in

calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more

than before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plantthat he might well

have owed her a brief poetic inspiration. It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled, more delicately

If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he

had said to me in our walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the good

news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction. It

may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool

fair lady who sat therea desire to prove himself not after all so mismated. Dolcino continued to be much

better, and it had been promised him he should come downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen

from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I

observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and

I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young

lady to smile at me as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the garden and we

sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the

middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sundial which,

rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly

and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood

still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the

brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me as a place to offer

genius every favour and sanctionnot to bristle with challenges and checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had

"Well, of most things," I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn't talked of Miss Ambient.

"Oh I guess I agree with them all." I was very particular, for Miss Ambient's entertainment, to guess.

"Everything's a big word, which I think we should use as little as possible. But how can we not want beauty?"

"Ah there you are!" she sighed, though I didn't quite know what she meant by it. "Of course it's difficult for a

woman to judge how far to go," she went on. "I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I'm intensely

sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw backdon't you see what I mean?I don't quite see where I shall

be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all," Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been baffled of this

modest desire. "And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?" she pursued with a dubious quaveran

intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me

to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember,

moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to

whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that

she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme virtue consisted

in answering the week's letters. Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: "It's quite a mistake

I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. "Surely his mother would know, wouldn't she?"

She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches. "As regards most matters

one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sisterinlaw will, or would, do. But in the present case

"Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety," I concurred. "But why do you call them strange?"

She repeated my words. "Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She's very anxious."

Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me, and I wished she would go and write

her letters. "His father will have seen him now," I said, "and if he's not satisfied he will send for the doctor."

"The doctor ought to have been here this morning," she promptly returned. "He lives only two miles away."

I reflected that all this was very possibly but a part of the general tragedy of Miss Ambient's view of things;

yet I asked her why she hadn't urged that view on her sisterinlaw. She answered me with a smile of

extraordinary significance and observed that I must have very little idea of her "peculiar" relations with

Beatrice; but I must do her the justice that she reenforced this a little by the plea that any distinguishable

alarm of Mark's was ground enough for a difference of his wife's. He was always nervous about the child, and

as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for the mother was to cultivate a

false optimism. In Mark's absence and that of his betrayed fear she would have been less easy. I remembered

what he had said to me about their dealings with their sonthat between them they'd probably put an end to

him; but I didn't repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house,

carrying the boy in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick face was turned

over Ambient's shoulder and toward the mother. We rose to receive the group, and as they came near us

Dolcino twisted himself about. His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in which, for the

moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression,

and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the child, argues that in spite of

her affectations she might have been of some human use. "It won't do at allit won't do at all," she said to

Her small nephew was rather white, but the main difference I saw in him was that he was even more beautiful

than the day before. He had been dressed in his festal garmentsa velvet suit and a crimson sashand he

looked like a little invalid prince too young to know condescension and smiling familiarly on his subjects.

Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining pointed shoes with enormous bows. "Are you happy now,

"Oh yes, I'm particularly happy," Dolcino replied. But the words were scarce out of his mouth when his

mother caught him up and, in a moment, holding him on her knees, took her place on the bench where Miss

Ambient and I had been sitting. This young lady said something to her brother, in consequence of which the

I remained with Mrs. Ambient, but as a servant had brought out a couple of chairs I wasn't obliged to seat

myself beside her. Our conversation failed of ease, and I, for my part, felt there would be a shade of

hypocrisy in my now trying to make myself agreeable to the partner of my friend's existence. I didn't dislike

herI rather admired her; but I was aware that I differed from her inexpressibly. Then I suspected, what I

afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor lady felt small taste for her husband's so

undisguised disciple; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and designing,

even perhaps a depraved, young man whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to

flatter his worst tendencies. She did me the honour to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she

didn't know when she had seen their companion take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured apparently

my evil influence by Mark's appreciation of my society. I had a consciousness, not oppressive but quite

sufficient, of all this; though I must say that if it chilled my flow of smalltalk it yet didn't prevent my

thinking the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against their background of roses, a picture

such as I doubtless shouldn't soon see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write letters, to

sit in the drawingroom, to repair to my own apartment and take a nap; but the only use I made of my

freedom was to linger still in my chair and say to myself that the light hand of Sir Joshua might have painted

Mark Ambient's wife and son. I found myself looking perpetually at the latter small mortal, who looked

constantly back at me, and that was enough to detain me. With these vaguelyamused eyes he smiled, and I

felt it an absolute impossibility to abandon a child with such an expression. His attention never strayed; it

attached itself to my face as if among all the small incipient things of his nature throbbed a desire to say

something to me. If I could have taken him on my own knee he perhaps would have managed to say it; but it

would have been a critical matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant regret for

me that on that strange Sunday afternoon I didn't even for a moment hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said he

felt remarkably well and was especially happy; but though peace may have been with him as he pillowed his

charming head on his mother's breast, dropping his little crimson silk legs from her lap, I somehow didn't

think security was. He made no attempt to walk about; he was content to swing his legs softly and strike one

Mark returned to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, repeating her mention of the claims of her

correspondence, passed into the house. Mark came and stood in front of his wife, looking down at the child,

who immediately took hold of his hand and kept it while he stayed. "I think Mackintosh ought to see him," he

"Is that the truth, or are you only saying it to be agreeable? You've a great idea of being agreeable, you

The child seemed to meditate on this distinction, this imputation, for a moment; then his exaggerated eyes,

which had wandered, caught my own as I watched him. "Do YOU think me agreeable?" he inquired with the

candour of his age and with a look that made his father turn round to me laughing and ask, without saying it,

"Then why don't you hop about, if you feel so lusty?" Ambient went on while his son swung his hand.

"Oh yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!" cried Mark with a grimace at his wife.

She turned her charming eyes up to him without deprecation or concession. "You can go for Mackintosh if

"She says that to get me away," he put to me with a gaiety that I thought a little false; after which he started

I remained there with Mrs. Ambient, though even our exchange of twaddle had run very thin. The boy's little

fixed white face seemed, as before, to plead with me to stay, and after a while it produced still another effect,

a very curious one, which I shall find it difficult to express. Of course I expose myself to the charge of an

attempt to justify by a strained logic after the fact a step which may have been on my part but the fruit of a

native want of discretion; and indeed the traceable consequences of that perversity were too lamentable to

leave me any desire to trifle with the question. All I can say is that I acted in perfect good faith and that

Dolcino's friendly little gaze gradually kindled the spark of my inspiration. What helped it to glow were the

other influencesthe silent suggestive gardennook, the perfect opportunity (if it was not an opportunity for

that it was an opportunity for nothing) and the plea I speak of, which issued from the child's eyes and seemed

to make him say: "The mother who bore me and who presses me here to her bosomsympathetic little

organism that I amhas really the kind of sensibility she has been represented to you as lacking, if you only

look for it patiently and respectfully. How is it conceivable she shouldn't have it? How is it possible that _I_

should have so much of itfor I'm quite full of it, dear strange gentlemanif it weren't also in some degree

in her? I'm my great father's child, but I'm also my beautiful mother's, and I'm sorry for the difference

between them!" So it shaped itself before me, the vision of reconciling Mrs. Ambient with her husband, of

putting an end to their ugly difference. The project was absurd of course, for had I not had his word for

itspoken with all the bitterness of experiencethat the gulf dividing them was wellnigh bottomless?

Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had left us, I observed to my hostess that I couldn't get over

what she had told me the night before about her thinking her husband's compositions "objectionable." I had

been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it constantly and wondered whether it mightn't be possible to

make her change her mind. She gave me a great cold stare, meant apparently as an admonition to me to mind

my business. I wish I had taken this mute counsel, but I didn't take it. I went on to remark that it seemed an

"Nothing's lost upon me," she said in a tone that didn't make the contradiction less. "I know they're very

"Don't you like papa's books?" Dolcino asked, addressing his mother but still looking at me. Then he added to

"I'd rather tell you some stories of my own," I said. "I know some that are awfully good."

His mother took this in silence. Her husband, during our walk, had asked me to remain another day; my

promise to her son was an implication that I had consented, and it wasn't possible the news could please her.

This ought doubtless to have made me more careful as to what I said next, but all I can plead is that it didn't. I

soon mentioned that just after leaving her the evening before, and after hearing her apply to her husband's

writings the epithet already quoted, I had on going up to my room sat down to the perusal of those sheets of

his new book that he had been so good as to lend me. I had sat entranced till nearly three in the morningI

had read them twice over. "You say you haven't looked at them. I think it's such a pity you shouldn't. Do let

me beg you to take them up. They're so very remarkable. I'm sure they'll convert you. They place him in

reallysuch a dazzling light. All that's best in him is there. I've no doubt it's a great liberty, my saying all

She bent her head and closed his lips with a kiss. "Of course I know he has worked immensely over them,"

she said; after which she made no remark, but attached her eyes thoughtfully to the ground. The tone of these

last words was such as to leave me no spirit for further pressure, and after hinting at a fear that her husband

mightn't have caught the Doctor I got up and took a turn about the grounds. When I came back ten minutes

later she was still in her place watching her boy, who had fallen asleep in her lap. As I drew near she put her

finger to her lips and a short time afterwards rose, holding him; it being now best, she said, that she should

take him upstairs. I offered to carry him and opened my arms for the purpose; but she thanked me and turned

away with the child still in her embrace, his head on her shoulder. "I'm very strong," was her last word as she

passed into the house, her slim flexible figure bent backward with the filial weight. So I never laid a longing

I betook myself to Ambient's study, delighted to have a quiet hour to look over his books by myself. The

windows were open to the garden; the sunny stillness, the mild light of the English summer, filled the room

without quite chasing away the rich dusky tone that was a part of its charm and that abode in the serried

shelves where old morocco exhaled the fragrance of curious learning, as well as in the brighter intervals

where prints and medals and miniatures were suspended on a surface of faded stuff. The place had both

colour and quiet; I thought it a perfect room for work and went so far as to say to myself that, if it were mine

to sit and scribble in, there was no knowing but I might learn to write as well as the author of "Beltraffio."

This distinguished man still didn't reappear, and I rummaged freely among his treasures. At last I took down a

book that detained me a while and seated myself in a fine old leather chair by the window to turn it over. I

had been occupied in this way for half an houra good part of the afternoon had wanedwhen I became

conscious of another presence in the room and, looking up from my quarto, saw that Mrs. Ambient, having

pushed open the door quite again in the same noiseless way marking or disguising her entrance the night

before, had advanced across the threshold. On seeing me she stopped; she had not, I think, expected to find

me. But her hesitation was only of a moment; she came straight to her husband's writingtable as if she were

looking for something. I got up and asked her if I could help her. She glanced about an instant and then put

her hand upon a roll of papers which I recognised, as I had placed it on that spot at the early hour of my

"I mean to take your advice"and she tucked the little bundle under her arm. I congratulated her cordially

and ventured to make of my triumph, as I presumed to call it, a subject of pleasantry. But she was perfectly

grave and turned away from me, as she had presented herself, without relaxing her rigour; after which I

settled down to my quarto again with the reflexion that Mrs. Ambient was truly an eccentric. My triumph,

too, suddenly seemed to me rather vain. A woman who couldn't unbend at a moment exquisitely indicated

would never understand Mark Ambient. He came back to us at last in person, having brought the Doctor with

him. "He was away from home," Mark said, "and I went after him to where he was supposed to be. He had

left the place, and I followed him to two or three others, which accounts for my delay." He was now with

Mrs. Ambient, looking at the child, and was to see Mark again before leaving the house. My host noticed at

the end of two minutes that the proofsheets of his new book had been removed from the table; and when I

told him, in reply to his question as to what I knew about them, that Mrs. Ambient had carried them off to

read he turned almost pale with surprise. "What has suddenly made her so curious?" he cried; and I was

obliged to tell him that I was at the bottom of the mystery. I had had it on my conscience to assure her that

she really ought to know of what her husband was capable. "Of what I'm capable? Elle ne s'en doute que

trop!" said Ambient with a laugh; but he took my meddling very good naturedly and contented himself with

adding that he was really much afraid she would burn up the sheets, his emendations and all, of which latter

he had no duplicate. The Doctor paid a long visit in the nursery, and before he came down I retired to my

own quarters, where I remained till dinnertime. On entering the drawingroom at this hour I found Miss

"I was right about Dolcino," she said, as soon as she saw me, with an air of triumph that struck me as the

"Very ill! Why when I last saw him, at four o'clock, he was in fairly good form."

"There has been a change for the worse, very sudden and rapid, and when the Doctor got here he found

diphtheritic symptoms. He ought to have been called, as I knew, in the morning, and the child oughtn't to

"He would be very happy anywhere. I've no doubt he's very happy now, with his poor little temperature!"

She dropped her voice as her brother came in, and Mark let us know that as a matter of course Mrs. Ambient

wouldn't appear. It was true the boy had developed diphtheritic symptoms, but he was quiet for the present

and his mother earnestly watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and Mackintosh would come

back at ten. Our dinner wasn't very gay with my host worried and absent; and his sister annoyed me by her

constant tacit assumption, conveyed in the very way she nibbled her bread and sipped her wine, of having

"told me so." I had had no disposition to deny anything she might have told me, and I couldn't see that her

satisfaction in being justified by the event relieved her little nephew's condition. The truth is that, as the

sequel was to prove, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities of the sibyl and had therefore perhaps a right to

the sibylline contortions. Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence an indiscretion and was

sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I put it to Mark that clearly I had best leave them in the

morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass the next days in the fidgets my company

would distract his attention. The fidgets had already begun for him, poor fellow; and as we sat in his study

with our cigars after dinner he wandered to the door whenever he heard the sound of the Doctor's wheels.

Miss Ambient, who shared this apartment with us, gave me at such moments significant glances; she had

before rejoining us gone upstairs to ask about the child. His mother and his nurse gave a fair report, but Miss

Ambient found his fever high and his symptoms very grave. The Doctor came at ten o'clock, and I went to

bed after hearing from Mark that he saw no present cause for alarm. He had made every provision for the

I quitted my room as eight struck the next day and when I came downstairs saw, through the open door of the

house, Mrs. Ambient standing at the front gate of the grounds in colloquy with Mackintosh. She wore a white

dressinggown, but her shining hair was carefully tucked away in its net, and in the morning freshness, after

a night of watching, she looked as much "the type of the lady" as her sisterinlaw had described her. Her

appearance, I suppose, ought to have reassured me; but I was still nervous and uneasy, so that I shrank from

meeting her with the necessary challenge. None the less, however, was I impatient to learn how the new day

found him; and as Mrs. Ambient hadn't seen me I passed into the grounds by a roundabout way and, stopping

at a further gate, hailed the Doctor just as he was driving off. Mrs. Ambient had returned to the house before

"Pardon me, but as a friend of the family I should like very much to hear about the little boy."

The stout sharp circumspect man looked at me from head to foot and then said: "I'm sorry to say I haven't

"Mrs. Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me he was sleeping so soundly, after a restless

night, that she didn't wish him disturbed. I assured her I wouldn't disturb him, but she said he was quite safe

"No, sir; I'll be hanged if I come back!" cried the honest practitioner in high resentment. And the horse started

I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient came forth from the house to greet me.

She explained that breakfast wouldn't be served for some time and that she desired a moment herself with the

Doctor. I let her know that the good vexed man had come and departed, and I repeated to her what he had

told me about his dismissal. This made Miss Ambient very serious, very serious indeed, and she sank into a

bench, with dilated eyes, hugging her elbows with crossed arms. She indulged in many strange signs, she

confessed herself immensely distressed, and she finally told me what her own last news of her nephew had

been. She had sat up very late after me, after Markand before going to bed had knocked at the door of

the child's room, opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted her and she had found him

quiet, but flushed and "unnatural," with his mother sitting by his bed. "She held his hand in one of hers," said

Miss Ambient, "and in the otherwhat do you think?the proofsheets of Mark's new book!" She was

reading them there intently: "did you ever hear of anything so extraordinary? Such a very odd time to be

reading an author whom she never could abide!" In her agitation Miss Ambient was guilty of this vulgarism

of speech, and I was so impressed by her narrative that only in recalling her words later did I notice the lapse.

Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with her finger on her lipsI recognised the gesture she had

addressed me in the afternoonand, though the nurse was about to go to rest, had not encouraged her

sisterinlaw to relieve her of any part of her vigil. But certainly at that time the boy's state was far from

reassuringhis poor little breathing so painful; and what change could have taken place in him in those few

hours that would justify Beatrice in denying Mackintosh access? This was the moral of Miss Ambient's

anecdote, the moral for herself at least. The moral for me, rather, was that it WAS a very singular time for

Mrs. Ambient to be going into a novelist she had never appreciated and who had simply happened to be

recommended to her by a young American she disliked. I thought of her sitting there in the sickchamber in

the still hours of the night and after the nurse had left her, turning and turning those pages of genius and

I must be sparing of the minor facts and the later emotions of this sojournit lasted but a few hours

longerand devote but three words to my subsequent relations with Ambient. They lasted five years till

his deathand were full of interest, of satisfaction and, I may add, of sadness. The main thing to be said of

these years is that I had a secret from him which I guarded to the end. I believe he never suspected it, though

of this I'm not absolutely sure. If he had so much as an inkling the line he had taken, the line of absolute

negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may at last lay bare my secret, giving

it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the

famous early dead and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw

at intervals during the time that followed, has, with her embroideries and her attitudes, her necromantic

glances and strange intuitions, retired to a Sisterhood, where, as I am told, she is deeply immured and quite

Mark came in to breakfast after this lady and I had for some time been seated there. He shook hands with me

in silence, kissed my companion, opened his letters and newspapers and pretended to drink his coffee. But I

took these movements for mechanical and was little surprised when he suddenly pushed away everything that

was before him and, with his head in his hands and his elbows on the table, sat staring strangely at the cloth.

"What's the matter, caro fratello mio?" Miss Ambient quavered, peeping from behind the urn.

He answered nothing, but got up with a certain violence and strode to the window. We rose to our feet, his

relative and I, by a common impulse, exchanging a glance of some alarm; and he continued to stare into the

garden. "In heaven's name what has got possession of Beatrice?" he cried at last, turning round on us a

ravaged face. He looked from one of us to the otherthe appeal was addressed to us alike.

"She has locked herself up with the boybolted and barred the door. She refuses to let me come near him!"

"She refused to let Mackintosh see him an hour ago!" Miss Ambient promptly returned.

"Refused to let Mackintosh see him? By heaven I'll smash in the door!" And Mark brought his fist down upon

the sideboard, which he had now approached, so that all the breakfastservice rang.

I begged Miss Ambient to go up and try to have speech of her sister inlaw, and I drew Mark out into the

garden. "You're exceedingly nervous, and Mrs. Ambient's probably right," I there undertook to plead.

"Women know; women should be supreme in such a situation. Trust a mothera devoted mother, my dear

friend!" With such words as these I tried to soothe and comfort him, and, marvellous to relate, I succeeded,

with the help of many cigarettes, in making him walk about the garden and talk, or suffer me at least to do so,

for near an hour. When about that time had elapsed his sister reappeared, reaching us rapidly and with a

"Is he dying? Has she killed him?" my poor friend cried, flinging away his cigarette.

"I don't know what she has done! But she's frightened, and now she wants the Doctor."

"Preciselytherefore Mark himself must go for him, and not a messenger. You must see him and tell him it's

"To save him? I'll save him, please God!" Ambient cried, bounding with his great strides across the lawn.

As soon as he had gone I felt I ought to have volunteered in his place, and I said as much to Miss Ambient;

but she checked me by grasping my arm while we heard the wheels of the dogcart rattle away from the gate.

"He's offhe's offand now I can think! To get him awaywhile I thinkwhile I think!"

Her manner was habitually that of such a prophetess of ill that I at first allowed for some great extravagance.

But I looked at her hard, and the next thing felt myself turn white. "Dolcino IS dying then he's dead?"

"It's too late to save him. His mother has let him die! I tell you that because you're sympathetic, because

you've imagination," Miss Ambient was good enough to add, interrupting my expression of horror. "That's

"What has that to do with it? I don't understand you. Your accusation's monstrous."

"I see it allI'm not stupid," she went on, heedless of my emphasis. "It was the book that finished herit

"Decided her? Do you mean she has murdered her child?" I demanded, trembling at my own words.

"She sacrificed him; she determined to do nothing to make him live. Why else did she lock herself in, why

else did she turn away the Doctor? The book gave her a horror; she determined to rescue himto prevent

him from ever being touched. He had a crisis at two o'clock in the morning. I know that from the nurse, who

had left her then, but whom, for a short time, she called back. The darling got munch worse, but she insisted

on the nurse's going back to bed, and after that she was alone with him for hours."

I listened with a dread that stayed my credence, while she stood there with her tearless glare. "Do you pretend

"She held him in her arms, she pressed him to her breast, not to see him; but she gave him no remedies; she

did nothing the Doctor ordered. Everything's there untouched. She has had the honesty not even to throw the

I dropped upon the nearest bench, overcome with my dismayquite as much at Miss Ambient's horrible

insistence and distinctness as at the monstrous meaning of her words. Yet they came amazingly straight, and

if they did have a sense I saw myself too woefully figure in it. Had I been then a proximate cause ? "You're

She had one of her tragic headshakes. "You think it necessary to protest, but you're really quite ready to

believe me. You've received an impression of my sisterinlawyou've guessed of what she's capable."

I don't feel bound to say what concession on this score I made to Miss Ambient, who went on to relate to me

that within the last half hour Beatrice had had a revulsion, that she was tremendously frightened at what she

had done; that her fright itself betrayed her; and that she would now give heaven and earth to save the child.

"Let us hope she will!" I said, looking at my watch and trying to time poor Ambient; whereupon my

"Let us hope so!" When I asked her if she herself could do nothing, and whether she oughtn't to be with her

sisterinlaw, she replied: "You had better go and judge! She's like a wounded tigress!"

I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore can't pretend to have verified the

comparison. At the latter period she was again the type of the perfect lady. "She'll treat him better after this,"

I remember her sisterinlaw's saying in response to some quick outburst, on my part, of compassion for her

brother. Though I had been in the house but thirtysix hours this young lady had treated me with

extraordinary confidence, and there was therefore a certain demand I might, as such an intimate, make of her.

I extracted from her a pledge that she'd never say to her brother what she had just said to me, that she'd let

him form his own theory of his wife's conduct. She agreed with me that there was misery enough in the house

without her contributing a new anguish, and that Mrs. Ambient's proceedings might be explained, to her

husband's mind, by the extravagance of a jealous devotion. Poor Mark came back with the Doctor much

sooner than we could have hoped, but we knew five minutes afterwards that it was all too late. His sole, his

adored little son was more exquisitely beautiful in death than he had been in life. Mrs. Ambient's grief was

frantic; she lost her head and said strange things. As for Mark'sbut I won't speak of that. Basta, basta, as he

used to say. Miss Ambient kept her secretI've already had occasion to say that she had her good

pointsbut it rankled in her conscience like a guilty participation and, I imagine, had something to do with

her ultimately retiring from the world. And, apropos of consciences, the reader is now in a position to judge

of my compunction for my effort to convert my cold hostess. I ought to mention that the death of her child in

some degree converted her. When the new book came out (it was long delayed) she read it over as a whole,

and her husband told me that during the few supreme weeks before her deathshe failed rapidly after losing

her son, sank into a consumption and faded away at Mentoneshe even dipped into the black "Beltraffio."