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yet seemed to him so charming as during these days spent
in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the
metropolitan element. Isabel was full of premises, conclu-
sions, emotions; if she had come in search of local colour
she found it everywhere. She asked more questions than
he could answer, and launched brave theories, as to his-
toric cause and social effect, that he was equally unable to
accept or to refute. The party went more than once to the
British Museum and to that brighter palace of art which re-
claims for antique variety so large an area of a monotonous
suburb; they spent a morning in the Abbey and went on a
penny-steamer to the Tower; they looked at pictures both in
public and private collections and sat on various occasions
beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens. Henrietta
proved an indestructible sight-seer and a more lenient judge
than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many dis-
appointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid
remembrance of the strong points of the American civic
idea; but she made the best of its dingy dignities and only
heaved an occasional sigh and uttered a desultory ‘Well!’
which led no further and lost itself in retrospect. The truth
was that, as she said herself, she was not in her element. ‘I’ve
not a sympathy with inanimate objects,’ she remarked to
Isabel at the National Gallery; and she continued to suffer
from the meagreness of the glimpse that had as yet been
vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes by Turner
and Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary
dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius
and renown of Great Britain.

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