Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/362

356 worked a change. This same interval had, doubtless, done something for me; so we both looked at each other for a moment in hesitation before permitting the joy of mutual recognition to burst forth. We soon found, on comparing notes, that we had been longing to find each other, and that nothing now prevented our pitching our tent together on the sunny Mediterranean shore, in the hope and belief that we should find that the companionship which had suited us so well twenty-five years previously, would only be rendered more full of interest and profit by the experiences which we had undergone since that period; nor had we conversed an hour before we became convinced that, however much we might have changed in outward appearance, our affection for each other, and our human sympathies generally, had undergone no alteration. It is therefore in a villa surrounded by orange-groves, with terraces overlooking the sea, built curiously into the fissures of impending rock, that I am writing this; or, to be more strictly accurate, I should say it is in a summer-house attached to the villa, fifty feet beneath which the sea is rippling in ceaseless murmur, while my friend, stretched on a Persian rug in the shade formed by the angle of the wall with the overhanging rock, here covered with a creeping jasmine, heavy with blossom, is watching the smoke of his cigarette, and listening while I read to him passages here and there of the notes which I had taken of our last night's conversation. It had been suggested by the arrival of letters and newspapers from England, and it occurred to me that the remarks of my friend as a calm and unprejudiced observer upon the present political, social, and moral condition of my own country, possessed a value which justified me in asking his permission to be allowed to publish them, the more so as he had just returned from spending some months in London; and he was of far too liberal and philosophical a temperament and cosmopolitan training and sympathy to be influenced by national prejudice; while, had he ever been once biassed by it, the treatment he had undergone at the hands of his own Government would have long since effectually removed it.

"I will introduce you to the public by telling the story of our previous acquaintance, just as it occurred," I observed. This the reader will remark that I have already done; but I did not read my introduction to my friend, as I knew he would have raised strong objections to the complimentary passages. "Now tell me what I am to call you?"

"Ivan is safe, simple, and not far from the truth, unless you prefer a pair of initials like my well-known countrywoman O. K. It has amused me to observe," he added, with a smile, "as I have watched the performances, social, literary, and political, how much more easy it is for a woman to understand the genius of a man than the genius of a nation."

"Perhaps that is because the nation is composed of women as well as of men," I replied.

"After all, it comes to pretty much the same thing," said Ivan; "for the genius that he understood well enough to beguile, seems to apprehend equally well the genius of the nation he governs, or he could not have beguiled it in the sense she desired. The whole incident serves to illustrate the mystery of woman's true sphere of influence, so little understood by