devil. Still, since it was very strictly dumb, you had to know her well, and watch her carefully, before you discovered its existence.She now occupied an attic in Pimlico, and worked all day in the British Museum library. She might have been more comfortable in a boarding-house, but she preferred solitude, or rather silence; she was perennially interested in her fellow-creatures, but she did not want to be talked to by them. She was always the spectator, never the actor, having eyes, and ears, a synthetic mind, and that delicate sense of humor, pity and irony in one, which is a lamp to the feet of its possessor.

But what marked Lettice off from other people was her passion for self-obliteration. Most of us in our hearts love to fill the center of the stage. Lettice was miserable there. She liked to be the fly on the wall. Yet she was unselfish as well as selfless, gentle, accommodating, all things to all men. She was like a penny-in-the-slot machine for doing good: you put in your need, out came her response: and she asked no more gratitude than the machine. To thank her was like touching the horns of a snail. A harmless whim in many ways, yet with elements of danger; for tastes of this sort strengthen as they grow, and Lettice's friends were beginning to fear she would fade away altogether to an impersonal ghost, unless something happened to call her back.

She should have been Merion-Smith too; she owed the affix to the same Irish grandmother from whom Denis had inherited his profile, his accent, his superstitions, and his family pride. He had been known to send back a letter addressed to the name of Smith. Lettice, on the other hand, had dropped the hyphen with all celerity. Denis might lecture her on her slackness; she concurred amiably so long as she was with him, and then went on her way exactly as before. Lettice on the surface was all sweet pliability, but underneath lay solid rock. Denis faced the world as an obstinate, pugnacious Irishman, whereas a skilful hand could guide him with a silken thread. Lettice read him like a book and made soft fun of him, but always with a reserve of peculiarly tender affection; she thought a great deal of her cousin. And Denis thought a great deal--a very great deal--of her. He was aware that in half her innocent speeches she was, to put it gracefully, having him on; but what did that matter? Lettice was Lettice. He did not analyze his friends; he idealized them.

Denis was received at No. 33 Canning Street by the daughter of the house, a smart young person in silk stockings who invited him, with never a "Sir" to her sentence, to step up and find Miss Smith in the top 

 Prev. P 25/255 next