Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IDEALS " C'est le vague ou 1'ame s'endort Sous les ailles blanches d'un rcve." " A ND all these years, while you have been /V 'going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it," you Ve never— once—been in love ? Not even in magical Italy, the very name of which is sufficient to put one in a susceptible condition ? Oh, I give you up ! ' If of herself she will not love, nothing can make her'—the fate of such a one is too horrible to quote ; but it is what you deserve, you hard-hearted wretch ! " Joan's voice came lazily from the depths of the big divan, where she had flung herself back to rest after posing. They had been workingat Joan's home for the last few pictures, because the luxurious setting was just what Elizabeth needed for the " Wisp " heroine, who, more and more closely, with an almost uncanny development, had reflected the traits and life- trend of Joan Whetmore. It seemed, indeed, as if the author must have drawn his character straight from the life. This the girls knew to be impossible, however, for, although Joan had heard much of Calvert Dodge, who had been at Harvard with Bertram Linton, and who had since been making a modest name for himself in New York journalism, she had never chanced to meet him. So that one was forced to believe, what was really true, that a conception of a girl had existed as an ideal in the man's mind,—an ideal which, surely more perfectly than usually happens in this prosaic world of ours, was capable of being realized in the flesh. The two friends had been discussing the d£- nouement of the story, a piece of lovable Quix- oticism and self-abnegation on the "Wisp's"part, of which Elizabeth had declared, truthfully, Joan would be quite capable — Joan, whose naively socialistic philosophy was, as ye...