'Bessie, you contrived once—meaning no harm, of course—to give me great pain, to humiliate me to the very dust,' said Ida, seriously. 'Let us have no more such fooling. Your cousin is—your cousin—quite out of my sphere. However civil he may be to me, however kindly he may speak of me, he can never be any more to me than he is at this moment.'
'Very well,' said Bess, meekly, 'I will be as silent as the grave. I don't think I said anything very offensive, but—I apologize. Do you think you would very much mind kissing me, just as if nothing had happened?'
Ida clasped the lovable damsel in her arms and kissed her warmly. And now Mr. Jardine turned back and joined them at the entrance to a wood supposed to be particularly rich in mosses, flowers, and fungi. Urania still absorbed the attention of Mr. Wendover, who strolled by her side and listened somewhat languidly to her disquisitions upon various phases of modern thought.
'What a beautiful girl Bessie has discovered for her bosom friend,' he said, presently.
'Miss Palliser: yes, she is quite too lovely, is she not?' said Urania, with that air of heartiness which every well-trained young woman assumes when she discusses a rival beauty; 'but she has not the purity of the early Italian manner. It is a Carlo-Dolci face—the beauty of the Florentine decadence. I was at school with her.'
'So I understood. Were you great friends?'
'No,' replied Miss Rylance, decisively; 'if we had been at school for as many years as it took to evolve man from the lowest of the vertebrata we should not have been friends.'
'I understand. The thousandth part of an inch, unbridged, is as metaphysically impassable as the gulf which divides us from the farthest nebula. In your case there was no conveying medium, no sympathy to draw you together,' said Brian, answering the young lady in her own coin.
She glanced at him doubtfully, rather inclined to think he was laughing at her, if any one could laugh at Miss Rylance.
'She was frankly detestable,' said Urania. 'I endure her here for
Bessie's sake; just as I would endure the ungraceful curves of a
Dachshund if Bess took it into her head to make a pet of one; but at
school I could keep her at a distance.'