"Well, love!"
"How little enthusiasm you possess about the beautiful! Now, if there were question of a new railroad-bridge, the vocabulary would have been exhausted."
"What would you have me say, dear? Is not that word a very comprehensive one? The lady above-stairs is indeed magnificent; but, Miriam, where is Bertie?" and he laughed.
"Ah! I understand; you find her artificial."
"She is too fine an actress for that, Miriam; only transfigured."
"Yes, I see what you mean" (sadly). "Bertie is wholly changed. Whom does she resemble, Wardour? What queen, bethink you, whose likeness you have seen? Not Mary Queen of Scots—not Elizabeth—"
"No, surely not; but she is, now that you draw my attention to it, strikingly like Marie Antoinette."
"She said she would be, and she has succeeded!" and I mused on the wonderful transition.
Four years more, and we heard of Bertie in England, as the rarely-gifted and beautiful American reader, "Lavinia La Vigne." Out of the répertoire of her family names she had fished up this alliteration, and "Bertie" was reserved for those behind the scenes.
It was declared also in the public sheets, what great and distinguished men were in her train; how wits bowed to her wit, and authors to her criticisms! But, when she wrote to me, she said nothing of all this, only telling of her visit to Mrs. Shelley, who had received her kindly, and to the tomb of Shakespeare, whose painted effigy she especially derided. "It looks indeed like a man who would cut his wife off with an old feather-bed and a teakettle," was one of her characteristic remarks, I remember; but there was a little postscript that told the whole story of her life, on a separate scrap of paper meant only for my eye I clearly saw, and committed instantly to the flames after perusal: