acquisition of charming manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be
exquisitely agreeable, and she brought to the task a really touching devotion.
How well she would have succeeded I am unable to say; unfortunately she broke
off in the middle. Her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate
circle. But I am inclined to think that she had not a real genius for the
matter, or she would have pursued the charming art for itself. The poor lady was
very incomplete. She fell back upon the harmonies of the toilet, which she
thoroughly understood, and contented herself with dressing in perfection. She
lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in Paris that
one could find things to exactly suit one's complexion. Besides, out of Paris it
was always more or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves. When she railed
at this serviceable city, and you asked her where she would prefer to reside,
she returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or in
Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at
each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows, and her
misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a decidedly
interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty, she
would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy. Now, she was both diffident
and importunate; extremely reserved sometimes with her friends, and strangely
expansive with strangers. She despised her husband; despised him too much, for
she had been perfectly at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a
clever man, who had slighted her, and she had married a fool, in the hope that
this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no
appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing that she
cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal
ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was, as I have said
before, eminently incomplete. She was full - both for good and for ill - of
beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of
the sacred fire.
    Newman was fond, under all circumstances, of the society of women; and now
that he was out of his native element, and deprived of his habitual interests,
he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to Mrs. Tristram; she
frankly repaid it