CHAPTER XVI.

Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

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._

Lilac 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 mediaeval 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

Cure 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

aesthetic 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 _protegees_, 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 creche, 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 _protegee_ 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

aesthetic 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 L40,000 then, and has

inherited since L60,000, and within six months after his marriage had

his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of L1,200 a year.

'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that

would have made me sure of L500 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 _not_ 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 pere_ 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, _borne_ 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 _protegee_ 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 cooperative friends?

Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Duesseldorf. 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 Archaeological 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 naive 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 cooperative 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 Pere 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 aesthetic 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.