Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/26

18 "And you won't stick to it?" the girl exclaimed, standing before him, open-eyed.

Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a compunction; she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him. "Your questions are much simpler than the elements out of which my answer should come."

"A great talent—what is simpler than that?"

"One thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!"

"Well, yours is so real, you can't help it."

""We shall see, we shall see," said Nicholas Dormer. "Let us go look at that big group."

"We shall see if it's real?" Biddy went on, as she accompanied him.

"No; we shall see if I can't help it. What nonsense Paris makes one talk!" the young man added, as they stopped in front of the composition. This was true, perhaps, but not in a sense which he found himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from being his first visit to the French capital: he had often quitted England, and usually made a point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward journey to the Continent or on the return; but on this occasion the emotions, for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amusement, of manifold suggestions looking to that quarter of thought to which, on the whole, his attention was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond,