THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.—JUNE, 1877.—No. 6.

SPRING LONGING.

What art thou doing here, O Imagination? Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, as thou didst come, for I want thee not. But thou art come according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee—only go away.—Marcus Antoninus.

L ilac hazes veil the skies.

Languid sighs

Breathes the mild, caressing air.

Pink as coral's branching sprays,

Orchard ways

With the blossomed peach are fair.

Sunshine, cordial as a kiss,

Poureth bliss

In this craving soul of mine,

And my heart her flower-cup

Lifteth up,

Thirsting for the draught divine.

Swift the liquid golden flame

Through my frame

Sets my throbbing veins afire.

Bright, alluring dreams arise,

Brim mine eyes

With the tears of strong desire.

All familiar scenes anear

Disappear—

Homestead, orchard, field, and wold.

Moorish spires and turrets fair

Cleave the air,

Arabesqued on skies of gold.

Lo, my spirit, this May morn,

Outward borne,

Over seas hath taken wing:

Where the mediæval town,

Like a crown,

Wears the garland of the Spring.

Light and sound and odors sweet

Fill the street;

Gypsy girls are selling flowers.

Lean hidalgos turn aside,

Amorous-eyed,

'Neath the grim cathedral towers.

Oh, to be in Spain to-day,

Where the May

Recks no whit of good or evil,

Love and only love breathes she!

Oh, to be

'Midst the olive-rows of Seville!

Or on such a day to glide

With the tide

Of the berylline lagoon,

Through the streets that mirror heaven,

Crystal paven,

In the warm Venetian noon.

At the prow the gondolier

May not hear,

May not see our furtive kiss;

But he lends with cadenced strain

The refrain

To our ripe and silent bliss.

Golden shadows, silver light,

Burnish bright

Air and water, domes and skies;

As in some ambrosial dream,

On the stream

Floats our bark in magic wise.

Oh, to float day long just so!

Naught to know

Of the trouble, toil, and fret!

This is love, and this is May:

Yesterday

And to-morrow to forget!

Whither hast thou, Fancy free,

Guided me,

Wild Bohemian sister dear?

All thy gypsy soul is stirred

Since yon bird

Warbled that the Spring was here.

Tempt no more! I may not follow,

Like the swallow,

Gayly on the track of Spring.

Bounden by an iron fate,

I must wait,

Dream and wonder, yearn and sing.

Emma Lazarus.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON & CO. in the office of
Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

A PROGRESSIVE BABY.

LETTER III.

18 Stanfield Gardens,
South Kensington,
May 28, 1875.

And there you have us down to date, my Susie. The sunshine and the crisp breezes, the innocent early teas with cresses and prawns, the grand long nights full of sleep, have put us all right with the world again; but after all Brighton's only a bit of West End moved off down by the sea, and if one must live in London at all, why, it's at its best for three or four weeks to come. And we're to get off early to Switzerland this year, for fear that it mayn't be so easy next summer. For Ronayne's father is clearing away to make him stand for that dreary territory of hovels and bogs in which the paternal mansion is situate. Fancy Ronayne an M.P.! And an Irish M.P.! I fight against it—under cover. The dream of my heart is an appartement avec tenasse in Paris, and in summer to turn vagrants and tramps as now. It's so unlucky Ronayne should have been the eldest son: duty, respectability, and the proprieties have such a much stronger gripe upon him, and we're born vagabonds, both.

But, what must be, must. Meanwhile I console myself with my window-gardening. And you should see the house-front!—the balcony that will be a perfect bower presently. My window-boxes, the gayest mosaics of color, and the vestibule lined with callas, acacias, and heath—against a background of ferns and ivy. We were never so magnificent before, and it was Ronayne's surprise for me when we came back from the sea—he having given our florist carte-blanche; whereas I, bearing a conscience, have bargained with him always, and carefully counted my pots.

Mrs. Malise's disciplinary Johanna brought her charge for a little visit to my nursery yesterday. And my heart aches so for that baby! He's a great child, well made, and with his mother's wonderful eyes—but so heavy, listless—"Meek as a work'us' child brought up on skilly," Ronayne renders it—and though he's perfectly clean now, and comfortably clad, nobody would dream he was a young mother's first baby, so ornamentless and sombre-hued are his little garments.

Nurse brings back indignant accounts of the way he's left to amuse himself, or cry his fill, when out for an airing in Kensington Gardens. "Hours, ma'am, she keep that poor thing a-frettin' or a-sleepin' in his perambulator, the east wind a-cuttin' about him as draughty as draughty, while she sits on a bench a-makin' her foolish lace or talkin' to some of them German bandmen. He never gets taken out, nor played with, nor has any playthings. It's just cruelty to animals—that's what it is!" finishes my nursery dragon, who is as soft-hearted as she is grim of exterior and grammatically independent in speech.

Mrs. Malise has been absent at suffrage meetings in Scotland and Ireland for a month past, Miss Hedges told me when dining here just after our return. Mrs. Stainton, the porcelain widow, was invited also, and a curious and wonderfully interesting person we find her: the daintiest small creature—complexion like an ivory painting, deep-set, seeress eyes, and looking fairly spirit-like for fragility, in her long black dress and white lace shawl. Nothing could well be more piquant than to hear this filmy little thing, in a voice that would have fitted Queen Mab, recount her experiences in the most widely separated circles of life and thought, or quietly give utterance to quaint, audacious speculations, as to mysteries that perplex so many of us concerning this existence and the eternity it preludes. "If there be a hereafter!" I heard some one answer to a remark of hers. "Ah, that was never a doubt to me save for a very brief space," she replied. "I am like the Curé de Ars—'I know some one who would be finely taken in if there were no Paradise!'" Her exquisiteness of look, the fascinating talk, the soft, helpless manner are so appealing that one is disposed to treat her as some wandered denizen of the air and skies, though she hangs effortless, her whole weight upon one, and there is scarce a limit to her fine-lady and delicate-organization requirements.

The daughter of a Low Church dean, she became, in her husband's time, first broad church, then rationalist; after his death, because of extraordinary, extra natural occurrences that befell her, a spiritualist, and now she seems to be turning toward Catholicism, though Miss Hedges, who is a Catholic, shakes her head, and says she always feels very hopeless of people essentially given to all manner of vague interpretations, fanciful twistings of simple doctrine, and æsthetic sentimental mysticism.

"Obedience is in the order of existence," says the little lady. "I long for authority; I long for a voice I shall not question, to whose decision I can submit all the questions that torture me."

"I tried to stay my soul with ritualism," she said, talking to Miss H. and myself when we were alone after dinner, "and at first I thought I was going to get some comfort out of it. I made my father furious by entering one of Miss ——'s famous sisterhoods. But it wouldn't do. Ritualism of course was not more illogical then than now, but the actors weren't as well up in their parts, and how queer some of our performances at —— were! I remember a retreat I made there, in which I was put into a cell bare of everything save a table and chair, and a Testament upon the table, and there I was left alone the whole day, seeing no creature save a Sister who, speechless, thrust my dinner and tea in at me! You may imagine the imbecile condition in which night found me.

"And as a punishment for some fault I was ordered to go to communion for four months without going to confession! Miss ——, our Reverend Mother, behaved exactly as if she had taken her notions of the external character and dignities of her office from some swelling, stern, ridiculous Lady Abbess in a no-popery novel! We undertook everything—teaching, the care of hospitals, training of servants, district work, Magdalen houses, and to these active employments we joined the contemplative, strictly cloistered life! We had no special training for either one of our labors; we had no completed constitutions or rule, and one was liable, at any moment, to be whisked from one's quiet cell and sent alone at night, across the kingdom, to some duty for which one was no more fitted than a baby or a savage.

"I was set, in the beginning, to clean lamps, and black-lead the grates, but failed in this business so completely that I was given a district in East London to afflict with visitations and instructions. Trying one day to convey some idea of the Real Presence to a voluble old woman who was one of the sisterhood's most devoted protégées, I said, 'Then, Sally, since you know who is in the church, I hope you never go in or out without showing proper respect.' 'Oh, yessum, yessum!' she assured me. 'Indeed, 'm, I allays bobs to the eagle!' (the brass eagle of the lectern!). With all Sally's bobbings to the eagle and to us sisters, she was a dreadful old harpy, and made me think always of two old women my father overheard talking one day at Cirencester. There is a fund there which was long ago bequeathed by some pious person for the furnishing small stipends to such aged poor people as should daily devoutly hear mass. Of course since the revenues have lapsed into Anglican hands this sum is used now for those who attend the early service. And this was what my father heard:

"First old crone, loquitur: 'These be hard times, Betty. How d'ye think of getting a livelihood this winter?'

"Second old crone: 'They be hard, for shore, Anne, and I'm a-thinking of taking to yorly priors (early prayers) for a quarter!'

"One of my droll, dreadful district visitor experiences I shall never forget. In the process of my visitations I stumbled, one day, into the room of a woman very haggard and very yellow, but as the woman was dressed and moving actively about, I had no idea of her having any special ailment, save dirt. But as soon as she knew who I was, a visiting Sister, she began to tell me how ill she was—ill of a disease that not another person in the whole kingdom had—the doctor said so—spotted leprosy. And how physicians came constantly to see her, and brought, each one, other physicians—how, in short of a horrible long, she was a sort of gruesome doctor's pet!

"The woman's husband—for she was married, had eleven children, and another baby coming soon—was working away at a cobbler's bench in the room's only window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he, Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago—you remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to see what a family I had—you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of the wretched babies, but become, after my mauvais quart d'heure with the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for life!

"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous, for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed life, a religious order without a constitution, frowned on by all the bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go and nurse a man ill with typhus—an agricultural laborer living alone in his cottage—and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an oracular assurance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One, whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has used her fortune to open a crèche, where she works harder than any of her nurses, and carries, I should say, the lightest heart in London.

"I have no doubt there is more system, more decorum—I use the word in its literal sense—in the Anglican sisterhoods now. I'm quite amazed sometimes at the closeness of the imitation of the real thing when I go to Margaret street, or to St. Alban's—the altars, the lights, the confessionals, the stations, the black-cassocked figures gliding about, removing their berettas and dropping on one knee as they pass the altar—all the furniture; but a dreadful feeling of emptiness—as if the house's owner had moved away! Do you ever look at the pictures and the titles of books in the windows of the High Church bookshops? What would have been thought of them five years ago even? And at ——'s in Oxford street, a High Church friend tells me, they have a room into which you may be ushered by inquiring for the 'Penitential Department,' if the card bearing the name of a clerical voucher, which you must present, be satisfactory, and where you may purchase disciplines—nail-studded armlets, waist-belts—perhaps hair shirts, though I don't remember that they figured in my friend's list.

"And, two years ago, I think it was, I witnessed a little scene that was as extraordinary as it was absurd. I was coming up from Cromer, and our train had halted for the usual time in the station at Norwich. It's a large station, trains constantly rolling in and out, and crowds of passengers, guards, porters flying about. While we waited, above the din suddenly was heard a singular and regular thud! thud! coming down the platform. Thud! thud! on it came, and the noise, and the queer, sudden hush of most of the other racket made us all look eagerly out to see what it could be. It was a progression—a procession—a man in soutane, barefooted, I believe, preceded by some sort of a servitor carrying a monstrous book—breviary, 'Livre des Heures'—I know not what, and a tall wooden crosier, whose foot it was that made the thud! thud! At a little distance behind the man in the soutane, whom I recognized directly as Mr. Lyne—the famous Father Ignatius, a self constituted Benedictine Abbot—followed two Anglican Sisters. The servitor and Father Ignatius betook themselves into a first-class carriage, the Sisters remaining outside, and presently the crosier head was thrust out of the window, and Father Ignatius appeared behind it with hand outstretched to bless the Sisters, who knelt devoutly on the platform to receive the benediction. Up to this point everybody had behaved with wonderful restraint; but the last stroke was too much, and it was amid a perfect scream of laughter from passengers, officials, cabmen, and gamins, that the train steamed out of the station, bearing the Benedictine Abbot away, but surely not leaving the lambs of the flock comfortless."

And so she goes on for as long as you like. She has been everywhere. She has known quantities of out-of-the-way people. She is ready at every turn with a fresh story, an apposite bit of experience, and darts in an instant from the perfect mimicry of a popular vicar we know, who preaches in lavender kids, and leaving his cure of souls for a month's holiday, pathetically from the pulpit entreats our Lord to look after his charge until its proper shepherd returns, to some speculation concerning personal accountability, an annunciation of the reasonableness of purgatory, and wondering as to its various forms of discipline for individual souls, or to dwell on minute phases of the preservation of identity, distinctive and original character after death, etc., and manifests altogether such an at-homeness with the unseen world that, listening to her, I half expect phantom eyes will look into mine if I glance back over either shoulder, bodiless somethings start forward from dusky corners, the very sweep of my own drawing-room curtains gets eerie, a what-not or a tabouret becomes a tripod, my unsubstantial small guest is a priestess—and I'm glad when Ronayne's voice breaks in, "All in the dark, the fire at its last coal, no tea or coffee. Mrs. Stainton, you're a syren!"

Her own little sitting-room in the associate house is as heterogeneous as herself—the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship for "little Malaise" has introduced me—a Miss Beauclerc, a short, stout, dark, coarse-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and an obstinate, honest, horse face.

She was exhibiting her own "spirit drawings"—mad scaramouches, things like designs for eastern embroidery, accurate representations of various portions of the kingdom of heaven, she assured me, and a quantity of utterly purposeless collections of strokes and dots, to which she gave names that would have been blasphemous in any but a lunatic's mouth. How she explained them! How fondly she looked at them! and what anguish she told me she endured lest they should be injured, or perish in some unworthy way. This woman believes herself to be the spirit bride of ——! Can you fancy it? one of the most fervent, poetic, spiritual, gifted of all Anglican divines. She says that since his death he has been constantly near her. She sees him often, leads the life he prescribes, making and shunning acquaintances at his direction, going from place to place, crossing the ocean twice even at his pleasure. Finally she showed a photograph—the faithfulest possible presentment of her own unideal face and person, with, floating above, arms extended in protecting angel guise, a mistily outlined, veiled figure surmounted by the refined, beautiful face known to everybody in the later editions of his poems, and in the windows of church bookshops—the poor clergyman who is allowed to rest neither in his grave nor in any unknown country beyond. It is hard for him, hard for Mrs. ——, were she to hear of this post-mortem masquerading and "affinity," hard for the deluded woman who wanders about the world alone with her crazy fancies, repudiated by her kindred, and plundered by the brigandish among her co-believers.

Here, too, I met again the tall, thin young lady, heroine of the device for frightening small bores—the Plymouth Sister's daughter. We talked of a good many things, but chiefly of marriage, and the position of unmarried women in England. The girl was as simply frank as a child. Matrimony, and matrimony alone, offered any career to women in England. And upon Mrs. Stainton's saying that despite her own perfect marriage—a marriage for love, and the union so entire that there lurked no shadowy region in her soul of which she could not make her husband as free as herself to enter—yet all that she had seen of life made her feel sure that, beyond a few rare exceptions, it mattered not, ten years after marriage, whether the match had been for love solely, or arranged, or a mariage de convenance, the girl assented; somewhat bitterly remarked that ideals were very well for a heroic life, but terrible drawbacks in the world of to-day, and that any woman would do better for herself to accept any reasonably suitable offer than to cling to an impossible dream, or insist upon a great amount of sentiment. "It ought to be enough," said this girl of the period, "for a woman to be able to decently respect a man who has the means of placing her in such conditions as she thinks will suit her. And men do very well without sentiment. They have their professions, their business, their friends, their clubs. It is quite enough for them if their wives are fairly good housekeepers and mothers, presentable at head of their tables, pleasant hostesses in their drawing-rooms. It sounds very mean, but what is a girl to do? We may be most of us clever enough and tolerably well educated, but there are not among us many brilliant geniuses who can find all comfort and happiness in a life devoted, wholly to art or literature. What is one of the mediocre mass to do? It's not genteel to do this, it's unfeminine to do that; one can't stir in any direction that would have in it some spirit, some earnest, something worth while.

"You can always do good, they tell us. I dare say; so can men; but how many among them would like to be recommended, as life occupation, to go making impertinent raids into poor people's houses to tell them they're untidy, when a family has but one room to live in, and there's but one water tap in the court, and two or three flights of stairs over which to carry every drop; or that they're ill-smelling, and will have fever, when an open drain and the dust bin are lodged just under the window, and somebody's great high wall cuts off every ray of sunshine; or that they don't know how to manage because they fare ill, when a half dozen people must keep life in them and some covering on them on fifteen shillings a week? Oh, I'm sick of it all! Look at mamma! She lives in jails, up alleys, in soup kitchens and dispensaries, and we girls cut out and make up flannels, and knew about relief tickets before we could speak, and it's all just pouring water into a sieve! Mamma's always in agonies about some protégée she's placed somewhere, who has absconded with the family plate and wardrobe. Her people are always getting drunk, fighting, or cheating her in some monstrous way. Her nicest girls run off with a strolling theatre company, or to dance in the ballet. There's no end to her miseries, and the people she spends her whole time, strength, and all the money she can spare and beg upon are not really much better off in the end. But even if they were? Mamma is mamma, and I am myself, and we're differing stars. No, I stick to my text. To be only a commonly contented married woman, with the shelter and freedom of a wife's position, with a house to keep, children and servants to look after, and with a certain amount of social influence, is better than to subside into a grim or fidgetty old maid in lodgings, with a dog and three-volume novels to get through the days and years with; to be snubbed and sneered at by men; to have, when one's hair is white as time can make it, the privilege of walking meekly out to dinner behind one's grand niece, a silly chit of eighteen, married a twelvemonth—and nobody to care whether one lives or dies, unless perhaps a Bath chair man.

"Matrimony's the only career for women in England, but we ought to be trained for it on Gradgrind principles. As it is, we're far too æsthetic and sentimental for the mates we must have—if any. Poetry and the stories of fine, gracious, self-sacrificing lives ought to be suppressed; they're ruinous reading for this nineteenth century." And so on and on.

"There's reason for that poor girl's bitterness," said Mrs. Stainton when we were again alone. "A dozen years ago, in her first and second seasons out, a more charming creature it would have been hard to find—ingenuous, sunny tempered, a dashing, sparkling blonde beauty, full of Irish quickness and fun, and a favorite wherever she went. Unluckily she met Ward Cotterell—now one of the editors of 'The Phare'—then a radiant, double first, handsome, chivalric, but as poor and debt-laden as he was clever, and the pair fell desperately in love. Mrs. Dixon wouldn't let them call themselves engaged. She had crippled her own fortune, and Kate had sacrificed a great part of her own portion, to clear a spendthrift eldest son and brother of his difficulties, and start him afresh in Ceylon, so that aid on their part was impossible, and Cotterell, after a year or so's trying vainly in this and that direction, for an income, gave up the struggle, married an heiress, who paid his debts, brought him £40,000 then, and has inherited since £60,000, and within six months after his marriage had his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of £1,200 a year. 'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that would have made me sure of £500 a year?' he said to some friend who knew the little story.

"Poor Kate kept up pretty well. 'What else could he do?' she always says. 'He had no income, and mine would have barely given us shelter.' But she refused offer after offer for years. Now, when she finds admiration less freely forthcoming, and is utterly weary of everything she has tried, or believes is in store for her, I dare say she fancies she regrets the lost chances, but she's too genuine to make a mariage de convenance, let her talk as cynically as she will.

"As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his wife is the most commonplace woman alive—no more a companion to him than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. No hero he, and yet his fate has plenty of compensations that Kate's lacks—power, work, and two or three children that have inherited his wit as well as his handsome looks.

"Oh, what a world it is!—a world of infinite pettinesses. I'm dreadfully poor and cowardly myself, but I've always had the greatest reverence for the gift of immortality, and I used to think if I could have chosen, I would have been born and then have died directly. But now that I believe unbaptized babies and people whose goodness, however perfect, is only natural, will have, in another existence, but natural beatitude, and as such a state wouldn't at all satisfy me for an eternity, I should have to tarry long enough to be baptized, and after that one can't wish to run away directly from the foes one has just promised to war against. A soul is such a responsibility, and is always thrusting in to complicate and confuse matters!

"But, do you know, I think so often what an admirable, harmonious, earthly preface to eternal bliss in the natural order would Anglicanism be—Anglicanism of the moderate type, a little quickened with the evangelical element, but neither high nor low. The life, as I remember it in the close at ——, was so pleasant, so decorous, so amiable, so full of good, comfortable, luxurious things, so ladylike and gentlemanly, so reputable. One kept the commandments mainly; one was never anything but high-bred and high-toned; one did one's duty too—taught a little in the schools; looked after the rheumatic old bodies in cottages delightfully picturesque to sketch, but dark and damp as graves to live in; handed buns and tea at the school treats; one wasn't always thinking about delicate matters of conscience, about renunciation, self-abnegation, and what it must mean to be a soldier under a captain who neither lived delicately, nor slept softly, nor was used to stately shelter—a crucified head whose arms are the instruments of the Passion—and how well off one's body was!"

And I've been—no, I've been bidden to the Dialectical Society. You don't know what that is, my barbaric New Zealander? And I didn't know either when Mr. Malise sent me tickets for one evening, specially urging my attendance, as there would be something well worth hearing—a paper on "Celibacy" read by its author, a gifted young girl of only twenty-two!

I took my tickets to my liege. "Ronayne, fount of wisdom and light, whatever may the Dialectical Society be?"

"The Dialectical Society, madam, is a body of men and women who meet to rake up, turn over, and discuss to all their verges subjects which the weaker mass of mortals think upon only on compulsion, with fear and trembling, and in mental sackcloth and ashes. And pray, what have you to do with Dialecticals, Eve? We are not going there, if that's what those tickets mean!"

"Oh, Adam! And why not? Because I'm, unluckily, married, am I to stop trying to improve myself, and not care to know what grand heights happier, unhampered women are scaling? And, Adam, only see, here's to be a paper read by a young lady only twenty-two, Mr. Malise says, and there couldn't be anything so very dreadful to hear in the little composition of an innocent young creature like that!"

"'Subject, Celibacy, by Eliza Stella Greatheart, M.D.,'" read Ronayne. "Humph! charming young creature! Well, madam Lil, you'll have to imagine what the medical young lady will say on the state she's proved to such ripeness of years, for you're not likely to hear, and Mr. Malise has wasted his tickets. And as if you cared what anybody could say about single blessedness—a woman with an angel in the nursery crib, and a husband who breathes but to serve her! Go away this minute!" And I left monseigneur to his moutons, a little huffed, no doubt, at being interrupted in the fine middle of a working morning—always "The Growth of Language"; and you should see the pile of MSS. I used to copy for him, but lately it has taken so much time to sketch my baby! Every new attitude is prettier than the last, and every day adds a charm. You need not laugh; I never had a baby before. Just wait until you know for yourself! I've painted the darling twice, once for Ronayne's father, though a little against the grain, for the old gentleman thinks it dreadfully infra dig. that I, a lady born, and I most especially a lady wed, should ever have been publicly catalogued as an artist in exhibition lists and newspaper notices, and have sold the labor of my hands, eyes, and brain in the marketplace. What would happen if he caught sudden sight of a memento that always goes with me in one of my boxes—a little tin sign, my first one; and how proud I was of it!

Fraulein Lilian Macfarlane.

I don't like, for the family's sake, to imagine. When Ronayne gave him the picture on his birthday, our joint offering, my work set in the loveliest frame Ronayne could find, he couldn't help being pleased, and he couldn't help knowing it was baby's very self; but if the picture had been the work of a paid artist, I know he would have been wonderfully soothed. The picture was on exhibition for some days in the morning room, and being one day in the conservatory with Ronayne, I heard his father expatiating upon the striking likeness that had been happily caught, to a lady visitor. Presently I heard her read the signature, "Lil. De Vere, del., 1873." "Why, it is your daughter-in-law's work! How charming for a mother to be able to paint such an admirable portrait of her child. That must double the picture's value to you!"

And the beau père hemmed and hawed, and made the general inarticulate noises of an Englishman embarrassed, or wishful to make an impressive speech, and finally got out:

"Aw, yes, yes—of course! A nice and amateur talent has Mrs. De Vere."

"Nice amateur talent!" I was fit to fly at him, and only the brutal—yes, the brutal—grasp of my husband kept me from rushing into the room and proclaiming "Mrs. De Vere's" antecedents—her artistic career sketched in a few bold touches.

The world would have ended then and there. But how delightful to have seen, first, his looks of blank horror at the idea of a daughter-in-law who had been used to rough it, and to make her little money go a fabulously long way.

"This is the daughter of Prof. Macfarlane!" he introduces me proudly sometimes. I wonder if he thinks a poor scientific man like papa could send all his young ravens about first-class, or keep a maid and a governess with one in various continental cities where she chose, as an eccentric whim, to abide and study art? What would he have said to my gloves in those earlier days when I earned nothing, and most of my allowance, beyond board and lodging, went for paints, and four pairs of dark, carefully chosen gloves had to go through the year? What to my lodgings at the tailor's—a poor cobbler-tailor, in Dresden? What to my lunches of Wurst beer and black bread? What to the concerts, where, in smoke and a three-penny seat, I heard music as good as plenty which costs me ten shillings to a guinea in London? What to all the cheek-by-jowl encounters with the peasants in our cheap, rapturously happy sketching tours? Bah! the poor Irishman! As if he could guess anything about it! Why should I think twice of his "amateur talent" and other little pin-pricks when the stiff, starved man never had, in his whole life, one such happy day of honest work, utter freedom, and simplest, blissfullest pleasures as have been mine by scores? Be easy, Ronayne. Not for the Bohemian daughter-in-law shall apoplexy smite the sovereign of Castle Starched-stiff-O!—which sacrilegious parody shall be my only revenge.

And if I portray my baby in every week of her life, her father turns her to account no less. She is beginning to chatter like a wren, and Ronayne has a notebook devoted to her earliest attempts at speech—the sounds, as she is progressively able to make them—the easily-conquered ones, the impregnable rock-fortresses, the turns, substituted letters. Sometimes I get quite furious over this anatomical process. My darling says something with the dearest, sweetest, small voice:

"Oh, Ronayne!" I cry. "Did you hear? Three words together—'Pease, papa, tugar!'" And I smother her in ecstasy.

"Yes, love," says Ronayne. "And do you notice how she can manage s before a, and not before u? This morning I shook her, and nurse asked her, 'What does papa do?' 'S-ake a baby,' she answered—but she never says sugar. And there's the same——"

"Oh, you vivisecter," I broke in; "I'll have you to know, sir, that my baby's pretty lispings are not to be treated like the rudimental language of a philologist's offspring! Put up that abominable book this instant! Did a cruel father, my lammie, spear his own child with a wicked pin, and stick her up in a case?"

I am a happy woman, Susie. Too happy; I'm frightened at it. You, may be, don't see where this comes in. If you don't, never mind. My heart does run over nowadays for all sorts of reasons, and no-reasons.

Later on Ronayne told me, apropos of the Dialectical, that his objection was like the Frenchman's to the fox-hunt—"he'd been," if you please—went with Dr. Thunder and the Truth-Seeker just before our trip to Brighton. Then the subject under discussion was marriage, and Lady ——'s son read the paper—a long argument against monogamic marriage: In the light of experience and human reason it was monstrous to make the promises required at the altar; monogamic marriage fettered man, made his best capabilities impossible, made women hypocrites and slaves, made love commercial, was physiologically a cruelty and a mistake, and so on, and so on. "You don't love Lady ——'s son. You would love him less had you heard the things he found it possible to say before the fifty or sixty ladies who found it possible to listen to him, and to take some active part in the discussion that succeeded.

"They called loudly upon Dr. Thunder to speak; but he refused to rise, preferring, I suppose, to hear how well his disciples could acquit themselves; for he is the author of a work upon physiology which is nick-named the 'Social Science Bible'—a book I believe to be one of the most mischievous that has appeared within recent years—materialistic to the last degree, degrading man, disorganizing society.

"Over a glass of wine afterward, Mr. Feldwick—I beg your pardon, the Truth-Seeker—told me a pleasant little history of Lady ——'s son. He says the man had, as a child and youth, a thoroughly good nature, frank, placable, extraordinarily loving and generous, and that then he bade fair to achieve great things as a naturalist.

"But Lady ——, who had had a hard experience of matrimony, with a husband whose only merit was his early death, lost, when this son was sixteen, her only other child, a boy of twelve—not an imbecile, but a slow, feeble-minded, gentle, and very beautiful child to whom mother and brother were passionately devoted.

"Lady —— was nearly frantic at this loss: would see no one; retired for a year or so to a desolate Scotch place they have, and then suddenly went abroad. There she flew restlessly from Algeria to St. Petersburg and Norway for awhile, seen everywhere, but nowhere long; then followed several quieter years when she spent her time chiefly at Berlin, Geneva, and Paris, forming in these places a large circle of acquaintances among the most revolutionary spirits of Europe. By and by they, mother and son, came back to London, but so changed—she in thought and speech, he in all things—that their old friends and kindred scarce knew how, comfortably, to maintain any intercourse with them, and the son, at least, seemed to desire that all old ties should be snapped asunder. The mother was for ever declaiming vague, inconsequent tirades against all things that are; the son was cynical, rough, disagreeable to an insufferable extent, and in their drawing-rooms a quiet, borné old friend was sure to encounter a tremendous procession of the emancipated—the reddest of reds, unwashed agitators of all tongues and hues, aggressive free-thinkers, poets screaming mad indecencies and blasphemies to vindicate the office of art; women whose mission it was, by nude dancing, posing, acting, to educate humanity and lift it to that plane whereon to the pure all things are pure; men of science standing on dreary pedestals of comely things they have shattered—a procession, in short, no one of whose members the humdrum old acquaintance would care to face a second time.

"More discouraging than all was a story that began to be whispered among the people who had known the family most intimately in the earlier days—the story of a young girl, a distant connection of Lady ——'s husband, who had been left an orphan when only a child, almost friendless and quite penniless, and had been, thanks to Lady ——, most carefully trained abroad to fill the position of musical governess, the girl having extraordinary aptitude for music. Her studies over, she accompanied Lady —— during a year or two of her later wanderings on the continent, and returned with her to London, where she soon obtained several good teaching engagements, and sang with great success at concerts during one season. A very pretty, winning creature she was, Mr. Feldwick said: a dark, rich-tinted face, where every emotion mirrored itself, and a manner as joyous, impulsive, frank as a child's, joined to the caressing coquetry of a Frenchwoman. She spoke three or four languages as well as English; her dancing was a thing to see in this awkward island; and the child was altogether so fresh and sweet that no one wondered that Lady —— insisted that her protégée must not think of finding shelter save with her.

"But young —— was not less sensible than his mother to the girl's charm, and it presently became evident that he had the child's whole heart in return. And now began difficulties. For years Lady —— had declaimed against the bondage, the hideous wrongs and wretchednesses of marriage, and had never tired in depicting a glorious earth-life in the future when the free man and woman should love each other because they loved—but be held to no duty of loving, no responsibility—free as the air to come and go; and young ——, fed on such food, companioned as he had always been, was far more vehement than his mother upon the subject, and had sworn by all his gods that civilized marriage should never count him among its victims.

"He told the girl he loved her, but that she knew he could not marry her; that the fetters of marriage would kill love in him; and he would rather assume them for any woman in the world than herself. The girl would have married him at a word; on her part there was the utter surrender of an adoring affection; but what would it be to have Herbert without his love?

"And she had not been so intimately a member of that household without coming to share its opinions and sentiments, so she declared that Herbert should give her his love, make no sacrifice for her, sully the ethereal nature of their relation with no worldly care. They were to be that grand pair, the coming man and woman, prophesied by Lady —— and her philosophers. But, most astonishingly to the young people, here Lady —— failed them. The coming man and woman were all very fine—some ages hence—but to have them appear in conventional, censorious London, in the century we live in, and in the bosom of her family, was too much for her heroism—'Her hereditary instincts, cowardice, and training,' her son said. Herbert might marry Mimi at any moment; no one could ask of the Fates a more lovable wife and daughter-in-law; but it was nonsense—worse, it was wickedness—to dream of living after or up to their convictions in society as now constituted. Did Herbert think for a moment what would befall Mimi if she acted as her generosity and all their ideas would prompt her? It would be destruction—simple destruction to the child, and if her son could not sacrifice his principles to his love, then he was bound in honor and pity, living in this unhappy time, to sacrifice his heart. At any rate Mimi must be protected.

"But the young man could not deny his principles, and would not deny his selfishness; so Lady —— sent Mimi from her, obtaining her a good position in one of the best schools at Brighton, begging the lady principal, an old friend of her own, to keep upon the young girl a watch that might almost be called a guard. She remained there a few months, and then, one fine morning, was suddenly missing, and Lady —— received a note from her, posted in London, to say that it was useless to struggle longer; Herbert was bitterly unhappy and disappointed in her, reflected on her want of love and courage, and that she, Mimi, had chosen her part, and meant to see if one could not honestly live one's frank life in the London of to-day.

"Lady ——'s expostulations with her son were useless. 'I like what you have taught me, mother, and my conscience is in the matter.'

"And the same delicate conscience prevented him from supporting Mimi pecuniarily. He said, and she confirmed, that there should be no tie between them but love—that no other gift was fitting from one to the other. The woman of the future would have no need of protection, or to barter herself for care and a home; she would love out of a sphere of fine, grand independence, self-reliance—so would and should Mimi. Poor girl! her sphere of independence has been anything but grand and fine: a life in shifting, third-rate lodgings, under an alias, for, keeping her maiden style, it was simply impossible with her means to secure anywhere a reputable shelter, singing in concerts to support herself, and getting now and then a few lessons to give where people don't inquire too closely if they can secure good teaching cheaply, but bereft of all friends save a few pitying ones who now and then come to her relief, with no young brightness in her life, separated from her children, for she has three or four who are inexpensively taken care of at a farm in Cumberland, at a distance too great for her to see them save for a short autumn holiday; seeing Herbert sometimes only at very long intervals, for he goes abroad frequently for long absences, and leaves her with scanter ceremony than most men bestow upon a faithful dog—the mean-spirited good-for-naught!—shabbily clad, and living, like a rock hermit, on bread, fruit, and a salad, to make the money cover as far as may her own and her children's simplest needs. One can't wonder that Lady ——'s beautiful hair has turned from lustrous brown to snowy white in these few years, or that she should be tormented, as Mr. Feldwick says she is, with remorse lest she be to blame for the miserable warping of her son, and the catastrophe of Mimi's existence. She would be glad to come to Mimi's aid and that of her grandchildren, but that Mimi never permits unless she is in extremis, having, as she says, taken her lot with full warning from Lady ——; and Mimi has a helper who asks nothing more than to succor her from his own very moderate store—a fellow singer who met and loved her in the days when she was free, and in these, her days of ignominy, loves her honorably and hopelessly still, and devotes himself to any service in her and her children's behalf that she will permit; a poor, little, unknown, unsung Bayard, whose earthly happiness may be added to those sadder wrecks of lives ruined by the theorizings of Lady —— and her co-vagrants."

What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation, every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it holds—that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped and deepest-down-pressed measure.

Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy as that whence this journeys to you from

Lil.

18 Stanfield Gardens,
March 12, 1876.

And do I never, in these days, see anything of my coöperative friends? Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Düsseldorf. Mrs. Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last what we had all been looking for—gone over to Rome—and one hears from her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace, allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found—absolute conviction and rest—though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean, say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'" she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!—a dear old country gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned antiquarian papers for the West of England Archæological Society.

"But you like stories. Here is papa's latest: One of his High Church confreres had been diligently expounding to a navvy the doctrine of the Trinity, and was boasting to papa of the intelligence of his neophyte. Papa, who holds very old-fashioned, inhumanitarian ideas as to the good or possibility of education for the masses, was scornfully incredulous as to the navvy's getting even an idea of the mystery upon which his friend had been instructing him. 'Will you go with me to see him, and convince yourself?' asked the clergyman. 'Delighted,' said papa, and off they set to find the navvy. After a little talk papa said to the man, 'This gentleman here tells me he has been talking to you about the Holy Trinity. Can you give me the names of the Three Persons?' 'Why, sir,' answered the navvy, 'there's God the Father and God the Son, but, to tell the truth, sir, I disremember the name of the other gentleman entirely!' Now I maintain that papa's in the wrong about the navvy, and that the ritualist clergyman had no reason to be so utterly disconcerted, as papa declares he was, at this naïve answer. Am I wicked, I wonder, to be repeating these stories? But you know I don't mean the least irreverence, and I can't help seeing they're droll! Somebody has said nobody is so irreverent as religious people, but I always reckoned that a sour-tempered saying, judging after the sense and not after the spirit. We have some distant Quaker connections where I visit sometimes, and in that household if one mentions our Lord in familiar conversation, as if He had a connection with the humble little events of the daily life, there is always a shocked hush, as if possibly it might not be unsacrilegious to speak of our Creator save on meeting days, and with formal removal of all lay business and speech. I am sure they never heard of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds. What would they have said to it?

"You hope that Mr. Feldwick's experience will not be mine, and intimate that if the Church fails me, nothing remains for me but the unbelief of our friends in the coöperative house. Yes, I've long felt that between Rome and rationalism there's no logical ground on which to rest. But I have no fears.

"Mr. Feldwick told me once that having, while a Catholic, read somewhere that St. Philip of Neri was so distressed at ecstasies that befell him in public that he tried the reading, before saying mass, of books on other than spiritual subjects, to divert the usual current of his thoughts and love, he, Mr. Feldwick, conceived this to be an authorization for him to read romances, speculative books, what not, by way of preparing himself to receive Holy Communion—after which history I never wondered that he had wandered out of the Father's House after the husks of spiritism. But it is very difficult to conceive him responsible. If reading qualified for heaven, how high up would he not be! But he seems rather born to accumulate all manner of heterogeneous information, and to echo the last 'Times' leader, the last clever paper in the 'Contemporary' or 'Fortnightly,' than to live a man's life of independent impression, expression, and will. I always hope that invincible ignorance and invincible prejudice may cover so much!"

Anna Hedges and the porcelain widow being gone from London, I should see little of the remaining confederates were it not for "little Malaise." His mother, I am sure, has given me up as a possible disciple. I have never been able to get beyond one suffrage meeting; I couldn't somehow sign my name to a petition that women be eligible pupils for the study of law, and I horrified her greatly by enthusiastic support of a proposition that garroters, wife-beaters, and committers of ruffianly assaults upon women and children be publicly punished with the cat. "So inhumane!" she said. "Such an education of the brutal instincts in the spectators! Surely I did not think what such a sight would be for the young, how much more it would inculcate in them revenge than the gentler virtues. And society was responsible for these criminals. They were what her neglect and their conditions had made them. They should not be punished for what was a misfortune rather than a fault. Our business was to train, develop these people instead of behaving to them as they did to their unfortunate victims." I admitted a trembling hope that something might be done for the humanizing of the next generation of our lowest-down people, but persisted that fear and shame seemed to me the likeliest means to stop the sickening record of cowardly savagery that week after week comes to us from all over England—the crimes of adults past all restraints save forcible ones. One week I kept a list, gathered from two provincial papers and the "Telegraph." Besides a dozen or so of the ordinary cases where a man beats and kicks his wife, and policemen and no onlookers interfere because she's the man's wife, one costermonger had flung his wife under a loaded van; one navvy had gouged out one of his wife's eyes, and threatened, in the police court, "to do for her yet"; another had pounded his wife to a horrible jelly with a flat-iron; another held his by force upon a red-hot stove; and the last on the list, a collier, nearly tore his wife in pieces, with the help of a bull-dog, "because she aggerewated him by giving him a leg of veal for his dinner when he'd made up his mind to a pair o' boiled fowls!"

But Ronayne says maliciously that Mrs. Malise has resigned me to obscurity and the fossil period; not because it was hopeless—the winning me—but because, after all, it didn't seem worth while. True I had broken from the ranks, set up in business for myself, and earned my bread for a while—but then how dreadfully ignorant I am. It was bad enough when I didn't know who Margaret Fuller was, and had never read Mill on "Liberty"; but the day I owned to a pocket dictionary, and my unaided helplessness as to double consonants and such vicious words as separate, niece, ascension, and so on, finished the business.

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone personages of her own or any other country—a mother puzzled always as to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the first hurdle-built church he and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere all mouldered away to dust; a mother who knew no more than sufficed to wield crayon and brush indifferently, and to love what she loves with her whole heart?

And I'm writing her life, her little life, with all its tiny unfoldings—a story of her being and doings, illustrated profusely with sketches and photographs—writing it for the Mabel of by and by. Will she forget the tenderness that's in every line and stroke when she comes upon such a sinful juxtaposition as this which Ronayne laughed at the other day. "Flanel peticoat?" Yes, "flanel peticoat"; it does look rather queer, but that's only because we're used to the wicked lavishness of the common fashion—and double consonants are only so much crinoline. When I worry sometimes as to what baby'll think of her mother being such a goose, Ronayne says the spelling and all the other stupidities are only piquant, and that he asks of heaven nothing better than a daughter only half as much to his taste as his wife is, which would be very dear of him to think and tell me if he had not rather upset it by admitting that if he had a son who persisted in spelling warm after his mother's eccentric fashion—wharm—he, my husband, would certainly "wharm" that boy—my boy.

And I'd sooner Mabel should laugh even unkindly at her mother's ignorance than ever see her turning over the leaves of a set of books wherein her mother's hand had carefully cut away every allusion to Christian belief, every repetition of God's name—such a set as I saw Mrs. Malise scissoring when I called upon her last.

"These are books that are accumulating for Mill," she explained—"presents from one and another—and I'm cutting out every word that can suggest to him the idea of any life or any world than the only one of which he can gain a certainty through his senses; childish impressions are so tenacious, and I mean him to be utterly free from influence or superstition; open to believe or disbelieve in immortality when his faculties are trained, and he can judge evidence fairly. The Christian scheme seems to me to rest on a mass of unworthy fables; but he is not to be taught in the sense of my conclusion. I shall guard him from my atheism as carefully as from accepted forms of faith. Surely no more can be exacted from a mother than to rear a child unbiassed, and let him make his own experiences, shape his own belief. I believe there are text-books in which no reference to any possible personal Creator of the universe is to be found, and we hope such are in use at the Genevan kindergarten, and Mr. Malise means, in some of his leisure time, to write a series of stories for children in which there shall be no hint of the supernatural; stories that shall deal only with this living, breathing world we know; with no pretty fiction concerning a life and personages generations of men have invented details for"—and I—

I seemed to move among a world of ghosts,

And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

But Geneva and these dreary story-books are two or three years off, let us hope. Meanwhile baby and I are grown very fond of the patient, lonely little man, and I have him here as often as Johanna is pleased to bring him. Great comfort, I see and hear, he has in Mabel's large, sunny day nursery, gay with birds and pictures, well stocked with playthings, and possessing an extraordinary wooden construction which our little guest beholds with the eye of faith, naming it rapturously gee-gee, and worshipping it as the king of beasts. When we are alone at dinner I have the mites down for a few minutes at dessert, and it is really pathetic to watch little Malaise's shy delight at getting a little fruit and an innocent sweet or two.

The Laburnums,
Henley-on-Thames,
July 16, 1876.

Changed quarters, you see, my Susie. It was so cold all June I thought we should be able to hold out until the end of the session at No. 18; but July came in flaming; so more for Mabel's sake than our own we've taken a pretty villa here at pretty Henley, for six weeks, and then we're off for Biarritz, where we mean to settle ourselves comfortably, and thence explore, at our leisure, all the lovely yet almost unknown near-by country. The grandpapa paternal has written begging that we'll leave Mabel, whom he calls "Tramp No. 3, and too small for the work," at Castle Starched-stiff-O; but Tramps 1 and 2 think they couldn't possibly fare on comfortably without that small golden head bobbing along beside them, up the hills and down the dales. Nurse is even more gypsyish than her master and mistress, and Mabel has spent the greater part of all her waking hours since she was two months old out of doors; so I think we shall always have in her the hardiest of small comrades.

Miss Hedges goes with us, and we mean, she and I, to bring back between us the entire Basque country in our portfolios.

"I'm thankful we're going to a region of picturesque men," says Ronayne, "for I think my lot in life likely to be a little less afflictive than it was last year. I don't much mind leading contrary minded horses up and down by the hour, coaxing suspicious or aggressive goats; I might even put another bull as savage as that fellow at Twickenham through his paces; but as to posing myself, in any possible fashion, even as a snoring shepherd, please to consider, ladies, that it's not down in our summer programme.

"Talk of the miseries of a man with a literary wife! What are they, I should like to be told, beside those of the unlucky mortal who's married a 'fair artist,' and can never so much as yawn in peace again, without being perpetuated in the act?"

"I had an eye to business when I married you, sir!" I retort. "You see you're a fine, tall, well-made animal, and since I own you, why should I go pay away my money for some other model who wouldn't be half so good-looking, and whom I couldn't frighten so well into minding me? Not pose indeed! Perhaps you would even choose to be bow-legged if so you could escape doing your duty? And I think you're maliciously trying to get stout. In our rides lately, I notice you puff a good deal if we have a bit of a race, and you're really getting a quite perceptible little bulge!"

And Ronayne, who knows very well that he's a capital figure, and whom I accuse of keeping the lowest button of his coat fastened in order to display his slender waist, gives an alarmed glance down at himself, and I see, to my great amusement, that no Bass is uncorked at luncheon, my lord consenting himself with a glass of sherry instead—a needless self-denial, I hasten to add, for he's really no more bulging than a greyhound! But he deserves the little scare for his attempt at rebellion. Fancy my husband having any will of his own about stopping in any attitude I choose him to take, and for as long as I choose! I knew such a queer artist in London, a rather coarse, wholly uneducated woman, but with a streak of real genius. She married the commonest, stupidest man, a pink-and-white young idiot of a tailor, grown now to be the "heavy father"—red, fat, lazy, letting his wife earn all the money. Somebody scolded about him to the poor, over-worked wife. "Yes, I know I have to keep the pot boiling," she answered, "but then Dave saves a model, he's the kindest father to the children, and he does all the sewing!" He doesn't object to pose, not he! And how proud he is of his wife! I found him alone in her studio one day. I looked over some engravings after Titian while waiting, and the man said, "Them engravings o' Titian's, now, ma'am, they're out o' drawing! But here's a picture o' my wife's that's more the real thing," putting on the easel, with affectionate pride, a painting in which two or three of their children were grouped—a trashy, tawdry, grinning thing, and yet with unmistakable touches of power. And this is a tale my husband has reason to know by heart, I'm sure! Not pose! I wish he had Miss Hedges for a wife! Anything like that girl's utter devotion to her work I've never seen in a woman. Rain or shine, cold or heat, are all one to her; she never has spiritually gray days when the grasshopper's a burden, and Capua itself wouldn't have unnerved her arm and purpose. Work! work! And everything turned to account.

Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my condition; but her first exclamation was,

"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all drawn, pinched—magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah, capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror and studied my face when I was desperately sick—but it was all green and pathos—no good! But your color's the very thing—only you get pink so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very instant you feel yourself going off!"

This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.

Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a picture in the Academy, her first, and on the line—a picture to which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the private view day—nobility and clergy, fellow artists and journalists, army and navy—such a day as she says can never come again for her, let the future have what success in store for her it may.

She has sold the picture for a thousand guineas, and her sketch in the Black and White Exhibition has appeared in one of the illustrated papers, the same paper offering her carte-blanche for illustrations. How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames Malise and her friends!—a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way, or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a spark of genius in her—to win what she has already done, and yet will do!

Mrs. Malise. That reminds me of that household. Our latest news from it, through Mr. Feldwick, who belongs to a "Sordello" club, for which my liege had a hankering, only they made him an Irish member, and so he'd no time (you wonder what a Sordello club may be? A society of ladies and gentlemen, dear, who read Sordello with a key, and try to find out whatever it's all about!), and Mr. Feldwick is good enough to keep him au courant of their discoveries and interpretations, and gossips with me about the Domestic Club. About this Mr. Feldwick is concerned. In losing Mrs. Stainton and Miss Hedges, the house lost much in his eyes, and there have been other changes, and all so much for the worse, that Mr. F. is seriously debating whether the place can long continue sufficiently respectable to be honored by the presence of himself and Smut—his pug dog. The people whom Lady —— brings about the place get queerer and queerer, and the ideas and schemes they broach are——"I'm a man of the world, and something of a philosopher myself," says Mr. F., "and I know human nature has plenty of shady corners; but, aw, really, aw, you know there must be some limit!"—which I was glad to hear from the Truth-Seeker. Young ——'s gone off to see if the Fiji islanders or some other outlandish creatures haven't more morality and tenderness and general virtues than the men and women of civilization; and when I tell you he sailed just after the death by diphtheria of three of poor Mimi's children, leaving her to bear that, as all things, unhelped by him, you'll wish with me, that some coppery, tough old savage'll eat him for his investigating pains! If anything can cure her infatuation, one would think this last stroke of barbarity might, and perhaps then there would be some hope for the singer lover, who has taken care of her, shared her grief—borne all the burden that the miserable new Rousseau refused.

The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring, unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and all her hungry progeny—ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd called their mother a cat!—on broad beans and porridge and next to nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!

The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party, dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a little fruit—the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously declared they could not understand how she lived at all.

Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms; but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable to report in her case.

Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss Hedges or to me. In one of her last notes she says, "Do you remember that little story I told you of Ste. Colette, the Saint who was walled up? I think of her so often, so anxiously; I think, I almost think, it will come to that—walling up, I'm afraid not the sanctity?—with me. What a harbor it looks—the cloistered life! And there never seemed to be any place for me in the world. Everything has turned to ashes in my grasp and on my lips. Perhaps it was that the religious life was always calling me. I repeat Père La Cordaire's saying over and over to myself, 'When we Frenchmen become religious, we do it meaning to be religious up to the neck.'

"I should not enter an active order. I have not the strength. But the contemplative ones draw me, draw me. Pray for me!"

Mrs. Stainton, Sybarite of Sybarites, a Carmelite, a poor Clare sleeping on a plank, washing herself with cold water and sand, living on begged bits, bad herrings, and limp cabbages! Shall we indeed see that?

20th July.

Susie! Susie! what an ending I must give my letter. Little Malaise is dead!

"Have you read the papers to-day, Lil?" Ronayne asked me as he was dressing for dinner two days ago.

"No, they're so stupid these days; nothing but Wimbledon and padding. Why? Is there anything to-day?"

"No, no; nothing," he answered, and though I thought his manner a little odd, I had forgotten all about it later when Archdeacon Ryder, who was dining with us, suddenly asked:

"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day. This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated, an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to me. Did you know it?"

"I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject, but I broke in:

"Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs. Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!"

And then it all came out—the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove—but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.

The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling?

And since I saw his mother—I went yesterday, having first sacked Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves—and found her unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed—since then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken flight.

Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my flowers all about him.

"How much you loved him!" Mrs. Malise said, as she stood beside me looking at him.

"And how pretty and happy he looks! I wonder if he is happy—if he is anywhere?"

"Well, some time we shall know! And perhaps it is better for him as it is. Often and often his father and I were perplexed as to what we ought to do for him by and by. At any rate he's past our marring! And I hope we shall have no more children to deal with—be responsible for."

Ronayne says I ought to add what I have only told him under my breath, that it completes my sketch of this "advanced" woman, a mother despite herself.

On leaving I said to her something as to where the boy would be buried.

"It is not quite settled," she replied, "but Kensal Green, I suppose. We are both strong advocates of cremation, and wish so much that it were a present possibility. If it were, and even a difficult one, we should certainly bear our practical testimony to the more sanitary way of disposing of our dead. But——"

"Heaven help you!" I interrupted; "and farewell!"

We dare not tell this to nurse, who, though she was the little fellow's fast friend, cried out at the first news of his death:

"Oh, I am glad he is gone, the poor dear! But he was too good for them, and I'm glad he didn't live to have his heart quite broken."

And so ends my going forth after new lights. I'm the richer for my foray in two friends, and the certainty that, Bohemian as I am, I am but a fossil too, and that nature fitted me exactly to my place in making me only the contentedly obscure wife of an Irish member and your

Loving Lil.

S. F. Hopkins.

MISS MISANTHROPE.
By Justin McCarthy.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHASTELARD.

"So you are really going to be an heiress, my dearest?" Mary Blanchet said to Minola, when our heroine was settled at home again. "I knew you ought to be, and would be if right were done; but right so often isn't done. My brother will be so glad to hear it! but not as other people might be glad, you know." For Mary began to be afraid that by a hasty word she might be filling the heart of her friend with suspicion of her brother.

"I don't know, Mary. Mr. Money, and others, I suppose, say so. I wish it were not true; I am all right as things are, and I hate the idea of gaining by this poor woman's death. I think I should not feel so if we had been friends, and if I could think that it was like a kindly gift from her, and that she wished me to have it. But it is all so different. And then what do I want of it?"

"One can do so much good with money," said little Mary sighing. She was thinking of her brother.

"Yes, that is true," Minola said, thinking of Mary herself and of what she might perhaps do for her. "But don't tell any one about this, Mary—not even your brother—if you can well help it," Minola added, knowing what little chance there would be of Mary's keeping such a thing secret from her brother. "It is all uncertain and only talk as yet, you know."

"These things are never secret, dearest," Mary said with a wise shake of the head. "Men always get to know of them. I think the birds of the air carry the news abroad that a woman has money, or that she has not," and Mary sighed again gently.

"Do you see much of an alteration in the ways of men toward me already, Mary? Do they hang around me in adoring groups? Do they lean enraptured over me as I sweep the chords of the harp? Do they who whispered that I sang like the crow before, now loudly declare that my voice puts the nightingale out of conceit with his own minstrelsy?"

"Now you are only talking nonsense, dear; for we know so few men—and then you don't play the harp, and you never sing in company. But, if you ask me, I think I do see some difference."

"Already, Mary?"

"Well, yes, I think so; in one instance at least. Not surely that you were not likely to have attentions enough paid to you in any case, if you cared about them or encouraged them, and that, even if you hadn't a sixpence in the world—but still——"

"But still it does enhance one's charms, you think? Come, Mary, tell me the name of this mercenary admirer. Depend upon it, all his arts shall fail."

"You are only laughing at me still, dearest, but there is something in it I can tell you for all that. It is not my idea alone, I can assure you. What do you think of a Duke's brother for an admirer, Minola?"

Little Mary Blanchet was a crafty little personage. She thought she could not too soon begin working for her brother's cause by trying to throw discredit on the motives of all other possible wooers. She had observed when going now and then to the house of the Moneys, during the last few days, that the returned cadet of the one great ducal house whereof she had any knowledge was there every day, and that he was very attentive to Minola. The same remark had been made by Mr. Money, and had called forth an indignant objection from Lucy, who protested against the thought of her Nola having a broken-down outcast like that for a lover. But Mary, who was almost terrified at the idea of sitting down in the same room with any member of the great family who owned the mausoleum at Keeton, was not certain how far the name of a family like that might not go with any girl, even Minola, and believed it not an unwise precaution to begin as soon as possible throwing discredit on his purposes.

Minola tried not to seem vexed. She had liked to talk to Mr. St. Paul when he came, as he did every day of her stay in Victoria street. She had liked it because it gave her no trouble in thinking, and it saved her from having to talk to others with whom she might have felt more embarrassed, and because it turned away attention from what might perhaps have otherwise been observed—as she feared at least—by too keen eyes. If Mary must suspect anything, it was a relief to find that she only suspected this, and Minola tried to make merry with her about her absurdity. But in her secret heart she sickened at such talk, and such thoughts, and felt as if the very shadow of the fortune which was expected for her, falling already on her path, was making it one of new pain and of still less accustomed shame.

"Poverty parts good company, used to be said," Minola thought; "a little money seems much more likely to part good company in my case."

Yet that there are advantages in a command of money was soon made very clear to Minola. When she returned from a walk a day or two after she found a specimen copy of Herbert Blanchet's poems awaiting her, with a note from Victor Heron. The letter was somewhat awkward and rueful. Mr. Heron explained that, by her express instructions, he had allowed Blanchet to have it all his own way in the arrangement of the style of his appearance in paper and print; and that the cost had become something far greater than he had anticipated.

"You should never have been troubled about this," Victor went on to say, "but that you made me promise that you alone should pay for this thing; I wish I hadn't made any such promise, or consented that Blanchet should have his way in the business. To think of a grown man, who has seen the world, leaving a matter of money and business in the hands of a girl and a poet! Blanchet has been going it."

Minola in all her trouble found room for wonder, delight, and something like alarm in looking at the superb edition in which the poems of Mr. Blanchet were to go before a world scarcely prepared for so much artistic gorgeousness. All that vellum paper, rare typography, costly and fantastic binding, and lavish illustration could do for poetry, had been done without stint on behalf of Herbert Blanchet. The leaves were as thick as parchment and as soft as satin. Only a very few lines of verse appeared on each broad luxurious page. Every initial letter of a sentence was a fantastic design. The whole school of Blanchet's artistic friends had rushed into combination to enrich the pages, the margins, and the covers, with fanciful illustration. If they only had been great, or even successful and popular artists, the book might have been worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately Mr. Blanchet's artistic friends were not yet great or famous. The outer world—the world which, in the opinion of the school, was wholly composed of dullards and Philistines—knew as yet nothing about these artists, and neither blamed them nor praised them. The volume was as large in its superficial extent as an ordinary atlas, and some of the poems which occupied a whole page were not more than four lines in length. The whole thing seemed truly, in the words of a poet whom Mr. Blanchet especially despised, "all a wonder and a wild desire."

Thinking of herself as the patroness and in some sort the parent of such a volume, Minola felt some such mixture of pride and timidity as a modest girl might own who has suddenly been made a princess, and is not quite certain whether she will be able to support her position with becoming nerve and dignity.

There came a little letter too from the poet himself. It ran in this fashion:

"Dear Patroness and Queen: The poet has not dared to send in unfitting casket the offering which your approval has made precious. The poems which are addressed to you must at least offer themselves in form not unworthy to be touched by your hand.

"In all devotion yours,

"Herbert Blanchet."

Nor did the volume want a poetical dedication. The second leaf contained the following:

UNTO MY LADY PATRONESS AND QUEEN.

Upon my darkness may there well be fall

Light of all darkness, darkness of all light;

Starfire of amber, dew of deathlike sheen;

Waters that burn, pale fires that sicken all,

And shadows all aglow with saffron light;

But comes my lady who is Glory's queen,

And all the bright is dark, and pallid dark the bright.

Minola read this dedication again and again, puzzled, amused, angry, hardly knowing whether to laugh or to cry. "Am I glory's queen?" she asked of her own soul. "And if I am, am I letting light or darkness in upon my poor poet? Am I depriving him of the amber, the dew, and the saffron light, or not? Is it praise or blame, this dedication? I suppose it must be praise, but I don't think anybody could tell from its words. Oh, my dear little Mary Blanchet, why must you have a brother—and why must that brother be a poet?"

There was one consolation—the dedication did not set forth her name, and nobody could know who the lady patroness of the poet might be. Minola felt inclined to be offended that she should be in any way brought into this folly, but she was not certain whether remonstrance or complaint might not be more ridiculous than utter silence. After all nobody knew anything about her or cared, she said. If she were to complain in any way, it would only grieve poor Mary, whom the thought that her brother could have offended her friend and leader would drive well-nigh distracted. "What does it matter if I am made a little ridiculous in my own eyes?" she asked herself. "It is only in my own eyes, I suppose. Mary will look on it all as delightful; her brother of course means it for the best, and thinks it superb poetry; and there is no one else likely to care either way. It is not much to be a little more ridiculous in my own eyes than I have already made myself."

Perhaps—perhaps—let it be said with hesitation and much caution—there was something not wholly unwelcome to our heroine in the idea that she could be glory's queen and all the rest of it, to any human creature, not to say any poet, just now. She felt humbled and deeply depressed. In her own eyes she was lowered by what she knew of her own heart. Her pride had received a terrible wound, almost a death wound. The little world she had made so proudly for herself had all crumbled into dust. It is not wonderful if at such a time there should be, in spite of her sense of the ridiculous and her senses generally, a certain soothing influence in the fact that there still was some one in whose eyes she appeared a person of account and even of dignity. At all events, let it be frankly said, that when the first shock and stir of the ridiculous were passed, Minola was not inclined to think more harshly than before of the poor poet who called her his patroness and his queen. As to the expense of the publication, she was a little startled at first, but that sensation very quickly passed away. She was not enough of a woman of business yet to care about the cost of anything so long as she had the money to pay. It would run her hard in her first year of independent life, to pay this much, but then she could pay it and live somehow, and it would only be a case for strict economy in the future for some time. Besides, it seemed that whether she would or not, she was likely to have much more money than she wanted or could use for any purposes of her own. Then she was further stimulated to carelessness by Mr. Heron's letter.

"If he thinks I care about money, or the cost of serving a friend, he is mistaken," she said. "His caution and his protestations are thrown away on me."

For she was much inclined to be unjust and harsh in her mind toward Heron now. He had committed, all unconsciously, a terrible offence. He had, without knowing it, made her fall in love with him. So she made the best of the whole affair, cost, dedication, glory's queen, and all; and when Mary Blanchet came to look at the precious volume, and to go into raptures over it, Minola did her very best to seem contented, and not even to suggest a criticism, or to ask what this or that meant. She reminded herself that the late Lord Lytton had written contemptuously of the "fools on fools" who "still ask what Hamlet means."

"This may be as far off from me as Hamlet from other people," she told herself. "Why confess myself a fool by asking what anything means? And in any case Mary Blanchet would not know any better than I."

By this resolve she made one woman happy.

But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred happiness. Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister could have wished him to be. The head of the poet swam in delight. He had never before been so proud and blest. He hung over his volume for hours; he could hardly get away from it. When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from its fascinations, he found himself drawn back again into its presence. He touched fondly its soft, satiny leaves as though they were the cheek of beauty; he pressed his own cheek against them; he committed all the follies which we understand and admire in the immemorial raptures of the young lover or the father of the first born.

"They must see this," he cried aloud. "They can't overlook a volume like this." "They" being, of course, that public whose opinion he had always despised—those critics whose praise he had always declared to be the worst censure to a man of true genius.

To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his breast for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That emotion came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager; but to be thus lifted to his longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and beautiful woman was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and seldom allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The emotion called up by experience was as new as the experience itself. Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of excitement he would probably, if need were, have laid down his life for Minola.

If Minola knew what strange effect had been wrought in the breast of her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money well laid out, even although she had wanted it far more than she did. "To making a man happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar entry on which a famous essay in the "Spectator" was founded. To make a man grateful for the first time is surely a nobler piece of work than to make him merely happy, and it ought fairly to cost a good deal more. Minola had made a man for the first time both grateful and happy. The work was a little expensive in this case, but what miser will say that the money was thrown away?

It is not likely, however, that Minola would have been quite so much delighted if she could have known all the feelings that her generous, improvident patronage had awakened in the poet's breast. For Mr. Blanchet knew women well, he thought; and he did not believe that mere kindness alone could have impelled Minola to such an act of bounty. Nor, making every needful allowance for the friendship between Miss Grey and his sister, did he find in that a sufficing explanation of Minola's liberality. He set himself to think over the whole matter coolly and impartially, and he could come to no other conclusion than that Miss Grey admired him. He was a handsome fellow, as he knew very well, and tall, and romantic in appearance: what could be more natural than that a poetic young woman should fall in love with him? He felt sure that he had fallen in deepest love with her, but it is doubtful whether he was yet in a condition to analyze his own excited feelings very clearly. It is certain that he was madly in love with his poems, with their gorgeous first edition, with the pride and the prospect of the whole affair; and of course likewise in love with the patroness to whom he was indebted for so much of a strange delight. But how much was love of himself and how much of Minola, he did not take time to consider.

There was an artistic and literary association to which Blanchet belonged, and amid which he passed most of his nights. It was not exactly a club, for it had neither definite rules nor even a distinct habitation. It was a little sect rather than a club. It was an association of men who believed each in himself, and all, at least for the present, in each other. Their essential condition of existence was scorn of the world's ways, politics, and theories of art. They held that man himself was a poor creature, unworthy of the artist's serious consideration. All that related to the well-being of that wretched animal in the way of political government they looked down upon with mere contempt. The science which professed to concern itself about his health, the social philosophy which would take any account of his moral improvement, were alike ridiculous in the eyes of this æsthetic school. If, however, any uninitiated person should imagine that in setting up art as the only serious business of life they were likely to accept any common definition of art, he would find himself as open to their scorn as if he had tried to improve a bad law or subscribed to the funds of some religious organization. Art with them was their own art. The enlightened parson, Thwackum, in "Tom Jones," observes that "When I mention religion I mean of course the Christian religion, and when I speak of the Protestant religion I mean the religion of the Church of England." It was in this spirit that the confraternity to which Mr. Blanchet belonged defined art. They only meant their own particular sect; out of that there was no salvation. Art, it is said, hath no enemy but the ignorant. These artists, however, were the enemies of all art but their own.

At the present these genial brothers regularly met of nights in the lodgings of one of them, who happened to have a large studio in the west central region of London, where so much of this unfashionable story happens to be cast. Victor Heron had many times been told of the genius that burned by night in that favored haunt, and had expressed a modest wish to be allowed to pass for an hour within its light. Mr. Blanchet was glad of the opportunity of introducing such a friend; for it somehow seemed as if the consideration of any member of the fraternity was enhanced among his brothers not a little by the fact that he could introduce into their midst some distinguished personage from the despised outer world. With them Victor Heron might very well pass for a distinguished public man, as in fact he already did, with no design of his own that way, in the eyes of Herbert Blanchet. To Victor the school was all composed of gifted and rising men, whom it was a pride to know or even to meet. To the school, on the other hand, Victor was a remarkable public man, a tremendous "swell," who had done some wondrous things in some far-off countries, and who, for all they knew at the time, might be regarded by the world as the prospective Prime Minister of England.

There was a peculiar principle of reciprocity tacitly recognized among these brothers in art. No one of them would admit that there was anything which his brother knew and he did not know. If one of them read an author for the first time, and came to meet his fellows proud of his freshly-acquired knowledge, he found no man among them who would admit that he had not from his birth upward been equally familiar with the author in question. It would be easy, surely, some one may say, to expose such pretension. Just so; of course it would. But when one brother had shown tonight that his friends had never read Schopenhauer, and in point of fact could not read him if they tried, who should guarantee that same brother against a similar exposure of his own harmless little false pretences to-morrow when he professed to know all about Euripides? It was not found convenient in this little circle to examine too closely into the pretensions of each other. Live and let live was the motto of the school so far as their esoteric professors were concerned.

There was indeed a legend that some malign person acquainted with the peculiarities of the school had once compelled them to invent a patron poet. It was done in this fashion: the malign person talked confidently and fluently to one of the order concerning a French poet, whom he described as a gifted apostle of a kindred school, and whom he was pleased to name De Patroque. The youth thus talked to was not to be outdone, or even to be instructed. He gave out that he had long had his eyes fixed reverently on the genius of the gifted De Patroque. He talked largely, not to say bouncingly, of the great De Patroque among his friends, who, not to be outdone in their turn, talked to him and to others of the new apostle. The fame of De Patroque grew and grew, until at last ill-natured persons affirmed that several essays on his genius, and fraternal hymns of honor, were composed for him by the admirers of his mythical career.

To this select circle Mr. Blanchet had for some time proposed to introduce his friend Victor Heron. On the very day when the first copies of the gorgeous poems were submitted to privileged eyes, Mr. Blanchet called on his friend. He found the friend a little put out by the unexpected lavishness of the manner in which the poetic enterprise had been carried on.

"This will be an awfully expensive business, I'm afraid," Heron said, in an embarrassed tone, for he felt that it was a sort of profanation to talk of money matters with a young poet. "I wish you had let me do this thing myself, Blanchet. I'd not have minded so far as I'm concerned. But I don't know about her, you see—she may not have much money. Then young ladies are generally so enthusiastic; she may not have thought of what the thing would cost."

"You need not think about that," Herbert said loftily. "Miss Grey will be a rich woman one of these days——"

"But I don't see that that much alters the matter, although I am decidedly glad to hear it for her own sake, if it will make her any happier than she is now—which I take it is not by any means certain. But I don't see throwing away her money without her knowing all about it any the more."

"Throwing away her money?" Herbert asked, in tones of lofty protest.

"Well, I don't mean that of course," the good-natured Heron hastened to explain in all sincerity. "You know very well, my dear Blanchet, what I think of your merits and your poems, and of all true poets. I know that it is an honor for any one, whether man or woman, to be allowed to help a poet to come out before the world and make a success. I only wish I had had a chance of doing such a thing for you; but this young lady, you know—I don't feel quite certain whether I ought to have spent her money so freely."

"I can reassure you, I think," the poet said, with chilling dignity. "I should never have allowed any one to do anything for me without having satisfied myself that it was done in the unstinting spirit of friendship, and by some one whom such kindness would not hurt."

"All right; I am glad to hear you say so, of course, but you won't wonder at my scruples, perhaps——"

"Your scruples, my dear fellow, do you infinite honor," Mr. Blanchet said, with a slight dash of irony in his tone, which Heron did not at the moment perceive, being in truth engrossed by some other thoughts. "But you may accept my assurance that there is no further occasion for them, and we will, if you please, change the subject."

Victor did not feel by any means well satisfied that there was no occasion for scruple, nor did he at all like his poetic friend's way of looking at the matter. But he reflected that Blanchet might after all have good warrant for what he had said, and that it was not for him to cavil at the generosity of a rich girl—if she were rich—toward a poor poet.

So they went along, the poet and his distinguished political friend, to the scene of the artistic and literary gathering, which the latter was so proud to see, and the former so proud to show.

We have all read in story about the effect of some little magic word, which once spoken makes that which was lovely before seem but loathly, and what was kindly wisdom sound like fatuous malignity. Was there some such ill-omened charm working all that night on Victor Heron? Nothing seemed to him like what he had expected. He was not impressed as he had felt sure he would be by the poets and other sons of genius. They did not seem to constitute an assembly of noble minds in whose midst he was to feel such reverence as the rude Gauls of history or legend felt in the presence of the Roman senators. The thoughts that he heard did not strike him as celestial in their origin. There was a good deal of disparagement and denunciation of absent authors and artists, which if the talkers had not been men of genius, Victor would certainly have thought ill-natured and spiteful. There seemed, at least, to his untutored mind, to be little more than a technical relish of art in all they said. It was not art they cared for, but only a clique and its tricks. A group of discontented spinsters girding at their younger sisters who were married could hardly have shown themselves more narrow-minded and malign. The effect on Victor was profoundly depressing. It was like that which might be wrought upon a youth, who after gazing in rapture on the performance of some queen of classic tragedy, is at his earnest desire taken to see her in her private life, and finds her slatternly of dress, mean of speech, wholly uninspired by her art, and only taking a genuine pleasure in disparagement or slander of her rivals.

If Victor had known the world better, he would have known that much, very much, of all this was but the mere affectation and nonsense of youth. These young men were as yet among the "odious race of the unappreciated." Yet a little, and some of them will make a success, and will have the credit of the world for what they do, and they will turn out good fellows, kindly, true, and even modest. Nothing makes some young men so insufferably conceited and aggressive as the idea that they are not successful, and that people know it. There are many of us mortals with whom prosperity only agrees. On the other hand, some of these youths will fail early, completely, and wholesomely in their artistic attempts, and will find out the fact for good, and will retire from the field altogether, and settle down to something else, and make a success, or at least a decent living, in some other way of life, and will forget all the worser teaching of their earlier days; and will look back without bitterness on the time when they tried to impress a dull world, and have no feeling of hatred for those who have done better, but will marry and bring up children, and be Philistines and happy. Youth has only one season—luckily for a good many of us, who are decent fellows enough as long as we are content to be ourselves, and can do without affectation.

CHAPTER XVII.

"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES."

But there was something more in Victor Heron's feeling of depression that night than came from the mere fact that he had found a few young artists not quite such heroic spirits as he thought they ought to be. It was the demeanor of Herbert Blanchet that especially spoiled the evening for him. In truth the head of the poet was not a strong one, and was very easily turned by any little stimulant of whatever kind. His volume of poems this night affected all his being. He felt sure that he was at last about to force himself upon the recognition of the world, and he made up his mind that Miss Grey was in love with him. He conveyed hints of his approaching good fortune to his companions; and he received at first with benign courtesy their compliments on the success that seemed to await him in life and love. But when some too forward person suggested that he could possibly guess at the name of the heiress whose heart and hand were to bless the lucky poet, then Blanchet became gravely and even severely dignified.

"You will excuse me, Mellifont," he said grandly, the brandy and soda having, as was the wont of any such liquor taken by our poor poet, gone straight upward to his head—"you will excuse me, I am sure, if I say this is not exactly a subject for jocularity; or even, permit me to add, for general conversation, although among friends. My distinguished friend, Mr. Heron, will, I am sure, exactly appreciate what I say. Things may not be so completely settled as to make it proper that they should be spoken of as if—as if in short they were settled; you will excuse me, Mellifont, my dear fellow—you will excuse me."

Victor Heron thought it time for him to go, and rose accordingly, and Mr. Blanchet insisted on accompanying him down the stairs and to the door of the house.

"I thought it right, you know," the over-dignified poet said, "to put a stop to that sort of thing. Men have no right to make such inferences. I should have no right myself to assume that things were settled in that sort of way. It is not just to others—to another at least. You appreciate my motives I am sure, Heron, my dear friend?"

"I don't know that I even quite understand what your friend was talking about," said Heron coldly. "But if it was about any lady, I should think such conjecturing highly improper and impertinent; and I should be rather inclined to put a stop to it even more quickly."

"Quite my idea—I am glad you entirely concur with me, and approve of the course I have taken. But of course you would do so. I knew I could count on your approval. By the way, you know Mellifont?"

"The man you talked to just now?"

"Yes, Mellifont—a very good fellow, though a little too fond of talking—I have had to reprove him more than once, I can tell you. But a very good fellow for all that, and one of the only true artists now alive. He is a composer—you must hear him play some bits from his opera. He is at work on an opera, you know—or perhaps you have not heard?"

"I have not heard—no. I am rather out of the way of such things, I fear," said Victor, beginning to feel, in spite of himself, a certain awe of a man who could compose an opera, and thinking that, after all, a certain allowance must be made for the genius of one who could do such things.

"Oh, you must hear some of it soon! We feel satisfied that it will sound the death knell of all the existing schools of music. They are all wrong, sir, from the first to the last, from Mozart to Wagner—all wrong except Mellifont."

Victor was for the moment really staggered by the genius of this great man.

"What is his opera to be called?" he asked, not venturing to hazard any compromising observation.

"'The Seven Deadly Sins.' It is to be in seven acts, and each act is to give an entirely new illustration of a deadly sin—which Mellifont will show to be the only true virtues of mankind. It will make a revolution, I can tell you."

Victor thought it could hardly fail to do that if it were at all successful in the object set out by its author.

"It is to have seven heroines," the poet went on, still at the door, and refusing to allow Victor to depart. "Lot's daughters—let me see—Messalina, Locusta; Jezebel I think, Theodora, and I believe, Mrs. Brownrigg. It will be a splendid thing."

It was not easy for Victor to get away, for the poet had to tell him of other great works of art that were in the contemplation of members of the school. At length Blanchet released him, thanking him grandly for the assistance he had lent to the bringing out of his book, but adding even more grandly some words that fell painfully on Victor's ear.

"I hope to be independent of publishers and drudgery before long; I fancy—I rather believe it depends upon myself, and I think I owe it to my own genius to raise myself above the necessity of drudgery. Then I could do something worthy of myself, and the few whose praise I value."

Victor escaped at last and walked away. He was in a very discontented mood, an unusual thing for him. He could not help believing that there must be, or at least might be, something in the idea which Blanchet so evidently wished people to receive. He feared that there must be something more than mere kindly patronage in Miss Grey's generosity toward Blanchet. The thought was strangely disagreeable to him. He could not think with patience of such a girl being in love with such a man. He was now disposed to exaggerate the demerits of the poet, and to believe anything mean of one who could take a girl's money and give out as an excuse for taking it that she was in love with him. "If I had a sister," he thought, "and any fellow were to give such hints about her, I wonder how I should like it, and I wonder how much of it I should stand!"

He felt sorry, very sorry, for Minola, and perhaps a little angry with her too for allowing to any man the chance of suggesting such things. The more he thought of her and all he had seen of her, the less she seemed fitted for such a lover as Mr. Blanchet. She had impressed Victor greatly by her manners, her fresh and frank character, and the simple, trusting generosity which was her transparent attribute. He began to look on the poet now as a mere fortune-hunter, who was fastening upon the girl because of the money which he expected her to have. He did not know how consuming a passion is the vanity of the small artistic mind—the mind which has art's ambition only and not art's inspiration. Mr. Blanchet was not a fortune-hunter in the ordinary sense. His poems were to him as yet much dearer than any fortune. He was drawn to Minola not because she had money, but because having money she was willing to spend some of it in bringing out his poems in a handsome edition.

Our hero's quixotic temper was thoroughly roused by the thought of some wrong which he fancied was about to be done to Minola. He was not one of those lucky beings who can let things alone. He never could let things alone. Had he had the gift of those who can, he would just then have been governor of some rising colony, and would have been in a fair way of promotion. He was tormented by the thought that there was something he ought to do to save Minola from some vaguely terrible fate, and by not being able to see what the something was which lay within his power to do. Before he had walked many yards he had worked himself into the idea that a plot of some sort was in preparation to entrap Minola into a marriage with one who, poet or not, was wholly unworthy of her.

His energetic spirit at length suggested something to be done. It was not, perhaps, a very practical or useful stroke of policy, but it was the only thing which occurred to him and the only thing which he did just then. He started off at full speed to walk under the windows of the house where Miss Grey was living. It was now fully midnight, and of course he had not the slightest idea of seeing Minola, and, indeed, would have been greatly embarrassed if he had seen her. But he started off, nevertheless, to walk under her windows with as eager a step and as steady a purpose as if he were really hastening to rescue her from some imminent danger. It was only a short walk from where he then was to Minola's lodgings; but Heron was so eager in his purpose that the way seemed miles, which he was covering with hasty strides.