Once she bought an etching and brought it home under her arm.

That kept her poor for a month, though she would have been less aware of it if she had not, before the month was out, wanted to buy another.

A great Parisian actress had made her yearly visit to London in June, and Elfrida conjuring with the name of the _Illustrated Age_, won an appointment from her.

The artiste staid only a fortnight--she declared that one half of an English audience came to see her because it was proper and the other because it was sinful, and she found it insupportable--and in that time she asked Elfrida three times to pay her morning visits, when she appeared in her dressing-gown, little unconventional visits "_pour bavarder_." When Miss Bell lacked entertainment during the weeks that followed she thought of these visits, and little smiles chased each other round the corners of her mouth.
She wrote to Janet when she was in the mood--delicious scraps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not write at all.

With an instinctive recognition of the demands of any relation such as she felt her friendship with Janet Cardiff to be, she simply refrained, from imposing upon her anything that savored of dullness or commonplaceness.