thought. “Our own features, and our own figures and airs, show a little too intrusively through all the characters we assume. We have so much familiarity with

one another’s realities, that we cannot remove ourselves, at pleasure, into an imaginary sphere. Let us have no more pictures to-night; but, to make you what poor amends I can, how would you like to have me trump up a wild, spectral legend, on the spur of the moment?”

Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story, off-hand, in a way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found to be when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen.

Her proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation.

“Oh, a story, a story, by all means!”