Elliot had a number of friends by now, all of whom admired his poetry, and Mrs. Elliot had prevailed on him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been in the tea shop.

The American lady admired my wife’s travelling-coat, and it turned out that the American lady had bought her own clothes for twenty years now from the same maison de couturier in the Rue Saint Honoré.

In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife.