She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn't.

I never met my pretty model in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exalted circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.
I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience, asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, the disclosure of effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had followed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who had literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung about her house door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through the very glasses of four-wheelers.

She lost herself in these reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr.Dawling was only one of a million.

When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had run after him.

Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wished very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she hadn't in the least wished to get Mr.Dawling.