The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises.

The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene.

Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing.

Are Eugene de Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point?
At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling.

It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.
We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current.