The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death; A Romantic Commentary

E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's Wood. Letter to Maria Gisborne
NOTE: This is an age of Trilogies and Sequels. The title at the beginning of this book, The Rising City: I, may lead nervous readers to fear yet another attempt in that extended and discursive direction .
To reassure them I wish to emphasize this point—that The Duchess of Wrexe is entirely a novel complete and independent in itself. It is grouped, with the two stories that will follow it, under the heading of The Rising City because the three novels will be connected in place, in idea, and in sequence of time. Also certain of the same characters will appear in all three books. But the novels are not intended as sequels of one another, nor is The Rising City a Trilogy.—H. W.
Felix Brun, perched like a little bird, on the steps of the Rede Art Gallery, gazed up and down Bond Street, with his sharp eyes for someone to whom he might show Yale Ross's portrait of the Duchess of Wrexe. The afternoon was warm, the date May of the year 1898, and the occasion was the Young Portrait Painters' first show with Ross's Duchess as its principal attraction.
Brun was thrilled with excitement, with emotion, and he must have his audience. There must be somebody to whom he might talk, to whom he might explain exactly why this occasion was of so stirring an importance.
His eyes lighted with satisfaction. Coming towards him was a tall, gaunt man with a bronzed face, loose ill-fitting clothes, a stride that had little of the town about it. This was Arkwright, the explorer, a man who had been lost in African jungles during the last five years, the very creature for Brun's purposes.
Here was someone who, knowing nothing about Art, would listen all the more readily to Brun's pronouncement upon it, a homely simple soul, fitted for the killing of lions and tigers, but pliable as wax in the hands of a master of civilization like Brun. At the same time Arkwright was no fool; a psychologist in his way, he had written two books about the East that had aroused considerable interest.