"It is strange that I should have loved that face so," said Jenny.

"It is very sweet of you,--Jenny, I had almost said,--but you are too
kind to me, and a little selfish too--you give me no time to admire you.
I wonder if Mr. Londonderry is modern enough to allow ladies to smoke in
his study."

And thus it comes out that Jenny often smoked there!

The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli,
and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that
sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance.
At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an
ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are
beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the
_bourgeoisie_. So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.

A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is
seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood
up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were
instantaneously attracted. She stood very simply, with one hand lightly
touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other
at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced
quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the
proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.

She began with some simple Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at
home; then she recited a fairy poem called "The Forsaken Merman," which,
of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human