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, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in her drawing-room.  After two or three talks they were fast friends.  Newman’s manner with women was peculiar, and it required some ingenuity on a lady’s part to discover that he admired her.  He had no gallantry, in the usual sense of the term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches.  Very fond of what is called chaffing, in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a member of the softer sex without feeling extremely serious.  He was not shy, and so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with shyness, he was not awkward; grave, attentive, submissive, often silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of rapture of respect.