Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her, more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the lattices of her mother’s sick-room came with a maddening summons to—live. She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the world outside there, so gay of heart, so victoriously vital.

At first, therefore, the renunciation, accepted on the surface with so kind a face, was a source of secret bitterness and hidden tears. But time, with its mercy of compensation, had worked for her one of its many mysterious transmutations, and shown her of what fine gold her apparently leaden days were made. She was now thirty-three; though, for all her nursing vigils, she did not look more than twenty-nine, and was now more than resigned to the loss of the peculiar opportunities of youth—if, indeed, they could be said to be lost already. “An old maid,” she would say, “who has cheerfully made up her mind to be an old maid, is one of the happiest, and, indeed, most enviable, people in all the world.”

Resent the law as we may, it is none the less true that renunciation brings with it a mysterious initiation, a finer insight. Its discipline would seem to refine and temper our organs of spiritual perception, and thus make up for the commoner experience lost by a rarer experience gained. By dedicating herself to her sick mother, Margaret undoubtedly lost much of the average experience of her sex and age, but almost imperceptibly it had been borne in upon her that she made some important gains of a finer kind. She had been brought very close to the mystery of human life, closer than those who have nothing to do beyond being thoughtlessly happy can ever come. The nurse and the priest are initiates of the same knowledge. Each alike is a sentinel on the mysterious frontier between this world and the next. The nearer we approach that frontier, the more we understand, not only of that world on the other side, but of the world on this. It is only when death throws its shadow over the page of life that we realise the full significance of what we are reading. Thus, by her mother’s bedside, Margaret was learning to read the page of life under the illuminating shadow of death.

But, apart from any such mystical compensation, Margaret’s great reward was that she knew her beautiful old mother better than any one else in the world knew her. As a rule, and particularly in a large family, parents remain half mythical to their children, awe-inspiring presences in the home, colossal figures of antiquity, about whose knees the younger generation crawls and gropes, but whose heads are hidden in the mists of pre-historic legend. They are like personages in the Bible. They impress our imagination, but we cannot think of them as being quite real. Their histories smack of legend. And this, of course, is natural; for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before us that they seem a part of that ante-natal mystery out of which we sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities past and gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes! They belong to that mysterious epoch of time—“before we were born”; and unless we have a taste for history, or are drawn close to them by some sympathetic human exigency, as Margaret had been drawn to her mother, we are too apt, in the stress of making our own, to regard the history of our parents as dry-as-dust.

As the old mother sits there so quiet in her corner, her body worn to a silver thread, and hardly anything left of her but her indomitable eyes; it is hard, at least for a young thing of nineteen, all aflush and aflurry with her new party gown, to realise that that old mother is infinitely more romantic than herself. She has sat there so long, perhaps, as to have come to seem part of the inanimate furniture of home, rather than a living being. Well! the young thing goes to her party, and dances with some callow youth who pays her clumsy compliments, and Margaret remains at home with the old mother in her corner. It is hard on Margaret! Yes; and yet, as I have said, it is thus she comes to know her old mother better than any one else knows her—society perhaps not so poor an exchange for that of smart, immature young men of one’s own age.

As the door closes behind the important rustle of youthful laces, and Margaret and her mother are left alone, the mother’s old eyes light up with an almost mischievous smile. If age seems humorous to youth, youth is even more humorous to age.

“It is evidently a great occasion, Peg,” the old voice says, with the suspicion of a gentle mockery. “Don’t you wish you were going?”

“You naughty old mother!” answers Margaret, going over and kissing her.

The two understand each other.

“Well, shall we go on with our book?” says the mother, after a while.

“Yes, dear, in a moment. I have first to get you your diet, and then we can begin.”

“Bother the diet!” says the courageous old lady; “for two pins I’d go to the ball myself. That old taffeta silk of mine is old enough to be in fashion again. What do you say, Peg, if you and I go to the ball together?”

“O it’s too much trouble dressing, mother. What do you think?”

“Well, I suppose it is,” answers the mother. “Besides, I want to hear what happens next to those two beautiful young people in our book. So be quick with my old diet, and come and read.”

There is perhaps nothing so lovely, or so well worth having, as the gratitude of the old towards the young that care to give them more than the perfunctory ministrations to which they have long since grown sadly accustomed. There was no reward in the world that Margaret would have exchanged for the sweet looks of her old mother, who, being no merely selfish invalid, knew the value and the cost of the devotion her daughter was giving her.

“I can give you so little, my child, for all you are giving me,” her mother would sometimes say; and the tears would spring to Margaret’s eyes.

Yes! Margaret had her reward in this alone—that she had cared to decipher the lined old document of her mother’s face. Her other sisters had passed it by more or less impatiently. It was like some ancient manuscript in a museum, which only a loving and patient scholar takes the trouble to read. But the moment you begin to pick out the words, how its crabbed text blossoms with beautiful meanings and fascinating messages! It is as though you threw a dried rose into some magic water, and saw it unfold and take on bloom and fill with perfume, and bring back the nightingale that sang to it so many years ago. So Margaret loved her mother’s old face, and learned to know the meaning of every line on it. Privileged to see that old face in all its private moments of feeling, under the transient revivification of deathless memories, she was able, so to say, to reconstruct its perished beauty and realise the romance of which it was once the alluring candle. For her mother had been a very great beauty, and if, like Margaret, you are able to see it, there is no history so fascinating as the bygone love-affairs of old people. How much more fascinating to read one’s mother’s love-letters than one’s own!

Even in the history of the heart recent events have a certain crudity, and love itself seems the more romantic for having lain in lavender for fifty years. A certain style, a certain distinction, beyond question go with antiquity, and to spend your days with a refined old mother is no less an education in style and distinction than to spend them in the air of old cities, under the shadow of august architecture, and in the sunset of classic paintings.

The longer Margaret lived with her old mother, the less she valued the so-called “opportunities” she had missed. Coming out of her mother’s world of memories, there seemed something small, even common, about the younger generation to which she belonged—something lacking in significance and dignity.

For example, it had been her dream, as it is the dream of every true woman, to be a mother herself: and yet, somehow—though she would not admit it in so many words—when her young married sisters came with their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois. She had not dreamed of being a mother like that. She was convinced that her old mother had never been a mother like that. “They seem more like wet-nurses than mothers,” she said to herself, with her wicked wit.

Was there, she asked herself, something in realisation that inevitably lost you the dream? Was to incarnate an ideal to materialise it? Did the finer spirit of love necessarily evaporate like some volatile essence with marriage? Was it better to remain an idealistic spectator such as she—than to run the risks of realisation?

She was far too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of disappointment. Indeed, the more she realised her own situation, the more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her mother as a safeguard against the risk of a mediocre domesticity. Indeed, she began to feel a certain pride, as of a priestess, in the conservation of the dignity of her nature. It is better to be a vestal virgin than—some mothers.

And, after all, the maternal instinct of her nature found an ideal outlet in her brother’s children—the two little motherless girls, who came every year to spend their holidays with their grandmother and their aunt Margaret.

Margaret had seen but little of their mother, but her occasional glimpses of her had left her with a haloed image of a delicate, spiritual face that grew more and more Madonna-like with memory. The nimbus of the Divine Mother, as she herself had dreamed of her, had seemed indeed to illumine that grave young face.

It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother, herself—a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children, as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end than real children? They represented, so to say, the poetry of children. Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of children as well. But here, as in so much else, Margaret’s seclusion from the responsible activities of the outside world enabled her to gather the fine flower of existence without losing the sense of it in the cares of its cultivation. I think that she comprehended the wonder and joy of children more than if she had been a real mother.

Seclusion and renunciation are great sharpeners and refiners of the sense of joy, chiefly because they encourage the habit of attentiveness.

“Our excitements are very tiny,” once said the old mother to Margaret, “therefore we make the most of them.”

“I don’t agree with you, mother,” Margaret had answered. “I think it is theirs that are tiny—trivial indeed, and ours that are great. People in the world lose the values of life by having too much choice; too much choice—of things not worth having. This makes them miss the real things—just as any one living in a city cannot see the stars for the electric lights. But we, sitting quiet in our corner, have time to watch and listen when the others must hurry by. We have time, for instance, to watch that sunset yonder, whereas some of our worldly friends would be busy dressing to go out to a bad play. We can sit here and listen to that bird singing his vespers as long as he will sing—and personally I wouldn’t exchange him for a prima donna. Far from being poor in excitements, I think we have quite as many as are good for us, and those we have are very beautiful and real.”

“You are a brave child,” answered her mother. “Come and kiss me,” and she took the beautiful gold head into her hands and kissed her daughter with her sweet old mouth, so lost among wrinkles that it was sometimes hard to find it.

“But am I not right, mother?” said Margaret.

“Yes! you are right, dear, but you seem too young to know such wisdom.”

“I have to thank you for it, darling,” answered Margaret, bending down and kissing her mother’s beautiful grey hair.

“Ah! little one,” replied the mother, “it is well to be wise, but it is good to be foolish when we are young—and I fear I have robbed you of your foolishness.”

“I shall believe you have if you talk like that,” retorted Margaret, laughingly taking her mother into her arms and gently shaking her, as she sometimes did when the old lady was supposed to have been “naughty.”

So for Margaret and her mother the days pass, and at first, as we have said, it may seem a dull life, and even a hard one, for Margaret. But she herself has long ceased to think so, and she dreads the inevitable moment when the divine friendship between her and her old mother must come to an end. She knows, of course, that it must come, and that the day cannot be far off when the weary old limbs will refuse to make the tiny journeys from bedroom to rocking-chair which have long been all that has been demanded of them; when the brave, humorous old eyes will be so weary that they cannot keep open any more in this world. The thought is one that is insupportably lonely, and sometimes she looks at the invalid-chair, at the cup and saucer in which she serves her mother’s simple food, at the medicine-bottle and the measuring-glass, at the knitted shawl which protects the frail old form against draughts, and at all such sad furniture of an invalid’s life, and pictures the day when the homely, affectionate use of all these things will be gone forever; for so poignant is humanity that it sanctifies with endearing associations even objects in themselves so painful and prosaic. And it seems to Margaret that when that day comes, it would be most natural for her to go on the same journey with her mother—and still be her loving nurse in Paradise!

For who shall fill for her her mother’s place on earth—and what occupation will be left for Margaret when her “beautiful old raison d’être,” as she sometimes calls her mother, has entered into the sleep of the blessed? She seldom thinks of that, for the thought is too lonely, and, meanwhile, she uses all her love and care to make this earth so attractive and cosey that the beautiful mother-spirit, who has been so long prepared for her short journey to heaven, may be tempted to linger here yet a little while longer. These ministrations, which began as a kind of renunciation, have now turned into an unselfish selfishness. Margaret began by feeling herself necessary to her mother; now her mother becomes more and more necessary to Margaret. Sometimes when she leaves her alone for a few moments in her chair, she laughingly bends over and says, “Promise me that you won’t run away to heaven while my back is turned.”

And the old mother smiles one of those transfigured smiles which seem only to light up the faces of those that are already half over the border of the spiritual world.

Winter is, of course, Margaret’s time of chief anxiety, and then her efforts are redoubled to detain her beloved spirit in an inclement world. Each winter passed in safety seems a personal victory over death. How anxiously she watches for the first sign of the returning spring, how eagerly she brings the news of early blade and bud, and, with the first violet, she feels that the danger is over for another year. When the spring is so afire that she is able to fill her mother’s lap with a fragrant heap of crocus and daffodil, she dares at last to laugh and say:

“Now confess, mother, that you won’t find sweeter flowers even in heaven.”

And when the thrush is on the apple bough outside the window, Margaret will sometimes employ the same gentle raillery.

“Do you think, mother,” she will say, “that an angel could sing sweeter than that thrush?”

“You seem very sure, Margaret, that I am going to heaven,” the old mother will sometimes say, with one of her arch old smiles; “but do you know that I stole two peppermints yesterday?”

“You did!” says Margaret.

“I did indeed!” answers the mother, “and they have been on my conscience ever since.”

“Really, mother! I don’t know what to say,” answers Margaret. “I had no idea that you are so wicked.”

Many such little games the two play together, as the days go by; and often at bedtime, as Margaret tucks her mother into bed, she asks her:

“Are you comfortable, dear? Do you really think you would be much more comfortable in heaven?”

Or sometimes she will draw aside the window-curtains and say:

“Look at the stars, mother.... Don’t you think we get the best view of them down here?”

So it is that Margaret persuades her mother to delay her journey a little while.

WHAT’S IN A NAME

In fact, like any woman in love, she had already forgotten her own surname, and desired, above all things in the world, to write her name, and work it in stitchery as: Juliet Montague. There is little doubt that in the seclusion of her chamber, she had already dipped her seldom-used quill into her ink-horn, and written it over thus many times:

And, if I be wrong in this, of this I am quite sure—that for Romeo, at all events, there was only one name by which to call a woman, the name of Juliet. Indeed, I would venture almost to say that true love knows its affinity by no other sign so surely as the first sound of the destined name. You remember how in Paradise, Rossetti heard the lovers

“Their souls were in their names!” says George Meredith, when Richard cried out the name of “Lucy,” and Lucy the name of “Richard.” Their souls—and their inexorable futures!

So was it with Dante when he first saw her who was called “‘Beatrice’ by those who knew not wherefore.” And so, I believe, it is with every man and woman. In fact, I should hardly count it a fancy if it were told me that in our cradles some spirit whispers into the still sensitive porcelain of our ears the name to which our lives shall answer as to the master-word of some dead magician.

We do not know the name—till we hear it, and, meanwhile, may have many mistaken fancies about it. Some beautiful girl of our acquaintance may be so full of charm for us as to cause us so to fall in love with her that we imagine hers to be the destined name. But, after a while that prescience in our ears saves us from the illusion. The ear does not give back that fairy chime when we hear her name, which it can give only to the sound of the name of names. Often our ears seem on the point of vibrating, as a woman tells us her name for the first name, but, after all—it was a false alarm of beauty, and we still go on seeking for the sound that alone can ring true. It may be that, in despair of ever hearing it, we content ourselves with another name; but that is a dangerous course, for one never knows when the fairy name may be spoken in our ears, calling us irresistibly to follow.

Thus I have known of men who were quite sure that their fate-name was Ann, tired out with waiting to hear it, marry another of the name of Mary—and then on their honeymoon, at last hear the name of Ann calling in their ears, with cruel unpunctuality. If only Ann had appeared and spoken her mystic name a month before—how different all would have been! And one could give others examples of other names heard too late.

One of the strangest stories of the kind is that of a friend of mine, which I propose to tell. From a mere boy the name of Irene had for him a prophetic beauty. Whenever he saw a beautiful face he felt certain that the only name worthy of it must be—Irene. He said to himself that he would marry no woman whose name was not Irene, and, that if a little girl-child should come to them she must be called Irene. It will not in any way spoil my story to say that he is long since happily married to a wife whose name is—not Irene, and that his offspring consisting only of three boys, he has had no opportunity to make use of his name beautiful. But this is merely a parenthesis. Long before life brought him to these conclusions, he dreamed of, and even deliberately sought, his Irene. Strange as it may sound nowadays, among all his researches he never came upon a girl whose name was Irene; nor did any gentle accident ever bring a single Irene into his orbit. Every other woman’s name in the appendix to the dictionary he seemed, at one time or another, to encounter—but Irene never!

You can hardly wonder that this negation of Irenes in his experience tended to deepen his original superstition; and make him more certain than ever that life was thus sifting out for him the other names one by one, till at last no other name was left but—Irene.

Meanwhile, he carried ever in his heart a picture of what the girl answering to the name of Irene would be like. The name to him suggested a combination of tall lithe grace, exquisite refinement, blonde hair in coiled masses of gold, blue eyes domestically kind, a gift for arranging flowers—and a hundred other ideal characteristics which may best be symbolised by an Easter lily.

An Easter lily—with a light upon it seeming to fall from some hidden window in heaven: in fact a creature exquisitely blended of celestial purity and skillful house-wifery.

How much more the name Irene meant to him I need not say—because I cannot; for the name of every man’s love is as we have quoted before, as that of Dante’s Beatrice. She is called Jane or Elizabeth or Kate—or Irene—by those who know not wherefore. Only one man in the world knows why Jane is called Jane, only one man knows why Irene is called Irene.

The least superstitious must admit it strange that, with all his eager listening for his predestined name, even, one might say, with all his experimental pursuit of it, he never met it till at last.... Well, I am anticipating. Being a man of leisure, he visited many countries, seeking his name; there was not a country of Europe in which he had not sought it, and even in Asia he had pursued it like a rare butterfly.

Common materialistic friends of his maintained that it was quite a common name. “If it be so common,” he said, “how is it that in all my wanderings I have never yet met a woman with that name?”

At last a friend suggested that he had not tried America!

“America!” he exclaimed, “America! wonderful country I know—but is it likely that in so new a world, a world so busy making its own beautiful names, that I shall find this rare old name of an ancient world? Surely I might as well expect to dig up a Roman coin in some back garden in Omaha!”

“Never mind!” said the friend of my friend. “Try America.”

So it was that my friend came at last to America, seeking his beautiful name.

Being a man of some public significance, he was asked, upon landing, what his business was in The Land of Promises; and, being a man of simple mind, he answered that he came seeking a woman of the name of—Irene. The assembled reporters shook their heads, and looked at him, as though he was crazy. No such name had ever been heard of in America. Of course, he was crazy; and so the papers had a day’s fun with the eccentric Englishman, and then his numerous excellent introductions started him upon that most generous pilgrimage in the world—the pilgrimage of the American Continent.

His introductions, I say, were excellent. I wonder if that was the reason why, though the best and most beautiful homes of America were thus thrown open to him, visiting here and visiting there, he never once heard the name he was journeying to hear.

At length three months had gone by, and no name remotely resembling the name he loved had sounded in his ears. He was indeed planning to sail back to Europe in a few days, when in a great Western town—I may as well say Chicago—a circumstance occurred which changed his intention.

No one who has visited America can fail to have been struck by the number and quality of the beautiful homes, so generously thrown open to him, and by the singular purity of atmosphere which pervades them; a purity so entirely free from priggishness—no negative purity, but a purity which one might call elemental, a purity, so to say, of joyous power, a purity as full of laughter and strength as a racing upland breeze. One has sometimes heard that there is no American home. To one sojourner in America at least this means the strangest of misrepresentations; for, on the contrary, one might almost go so far as to say that in no other country in the world is there such a genuine home-life as in America. And I venture to think that in no American city is this home-life to be found in fairer development than in Chicago. In such a home, one never-to-be-forgotten evening, my friend found himself a guest. Those who talk of American bad taste, of American ignorance of, or disregard for, the beautiful things of life should be taken to see that home. The gracious order of it, the unobtrusive richness, the organic beauty of it, as distinct from a conscious æstheticism, immediately impressed a nature very sensitive to such conditions; and the moment my friend met the only daughter of the household he knew at once from whom all this harmony proceeded. His host and hostess were charming simple people, the polo-playing son-and-heir was a delightful fellow; but it was evident that the harmony did not proceed from them.

No! it very evidently came from this tall, lithe girl, with that heavy crown of gold upon her head, those kind blue domestic eyes, and that supernal light upon her exquisitely blonde features. As my friend looked at her, sitting by her side at the dinner-table, he felt that here at last was the woman he had been seeking so long, for, in every particular she answered to the dream of his long-sought Irene. In her father’s introduction to him, however, he had not quite caught her name; so he sat through dinner in a fever of attention, hoping every moment to hear it pronounced again. But by one of those exceptions to the usual which do occur, no occasion for the direct use of her name occurred throughout the dinner, and he being as yet so new an acquaintance, and afraid besides lest he should hear the wrong name, had not courage to ask it. However, after dinner, it being a summer night, coffee was served on the veranda, and here he found both his courage and his opportunity. There was a sentimental crescent moon in the sky, and the veranda was filled with romantic lights and shadows. Miss Stanbery and my friend had found themselves a little away from the rest. She had seemed hardly less drawn to him than he to her, and at last he felt that, without violating the proprieties of a guest, he might ask her Christian name.

She bent her beautiful head, with a lovely shyness, and answered that her name was—

“Ireen.”

“Ireen?” said my friend, leaning toward her beauty in the twilight.

“It is a beautiful name.”

To himself he was saying how strangely like, and yet how strangely unlike, it was to the name of which she seemed the ideal embodiment.

“Ireen,” he said over to himself, and the drums of his ears almost chimed back—but alas! failed quite to chime.

“Ireen? Ireen?” he said over and over to himself, trying to make the name sound right, and, when he found it impossible, he looked again at her young loveliness, and wondered to himself if her name was not near enough to the name he loved.

But in the end his superstition prevailed, and reluctantly he bade good-bye to Ireen Stanbery, and took train for New York, and boarded his liner, and sailed back to Europe sad at heart.

A year went by, and having given up all hopes of finding his Irene, he married, as I have said, a lady of the name of——, and was very happy—that is as happy as a man or woman can be who has married the wrong name.

He had been married about three years, when he chanced one evening to be dining in London with an American gentleman.

They compared notes on America.

“Do you know the Stanberys of Chicago?” asked my friend, among other questions.

“O yes! aren’t they delightful people? And what a beautiful girl Irene is—she was married six months ago by the way.”

“What name did you call her?” asked my friend.

“Irene.”

“Irene! Why I thought they called her Ireen!”

“So they do—but didn’t you know that that is the American way of pronouncing ‘Irene’?”

“Indeed, I didn’t,” gasped my friend, and in his soul he said “O that I had known!”

The moral of which is that it is very hard to lose one’s love through a mispronunciation.

REVISITING THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

In spite of these excursions, and in defiance of the apparent paradox of the statement, Sid Norton found himself in love—for the first and last time. This he said of himself gravely, not only in private to the lady who was credited with this marvel but also in public to his intimate friends. He said it, and there was no doubt that he meant it.

Now Rosamund Lowther was an exceedingly clever young woman, an adept in the management of the emotional male, and easily Sid Norton’s match in experienced flirtation. The friends of both watched the progress of their sudden volcanic attachment with cynical expectancy, and when, after six months of a trance-like courtship, during which it might be said that the infatuated pair had never taken their eyes off each other, Sid Norton suddenly sailed for Europe, you can imagine the sensation and comment it caused. Neither vouchsafed any explanation; their engagement remained intact, at all events there was no formal bulletin to the contrary; and the thing was a piquant mystery to all but the two concerned. For them it was their whimsical secret.

One late summer afternoon a week or two before, the two enamoured ones had been seated side by side in the old orchard of the Lowther country home. Both were very evidently happy, but Sid’s face was absolutely idiotic with bliss. The something so “utter” in Sid’s look touched Rosamund’s elfish sense of humour, and, though she was just as much in love herself, she could not refrain from a gay little teasing laugh.

“Is he so happy, little boy?” she said, lifting up his chin, and looking whimsically into his face.

Sid’s answer was silent and long, and when it was ended, Rosamund continued, holding his face at arm’s length, and looking into it with quizzical seriousness.

“But, aren’t you just a little frightened sometimes?”

“Frightened?”

“Yes! when you think that—it’s for life!”

“Ah! thank God,” answered Sid rapturously.

“No, but think—for life! No more pretty flirtations, no more butterfly by-paths—only me—me—till the end. Be honest—doesn’t that make cold shivers run up and down your back?”

“You angel,” exclaimed the abject one, attempting to answer her as before.

“No, no; listen to me. I am serious. Do you realise that you are in a cage, my cage, for life—that escape is impossible—that it will be in vain to beat on the bars—that only I have the key—that you are there for better or for worse—that you are there, I repeat, for life—that there is no help for it—nothing to do but make the best of it—do you realise that?”

The sense of certitude, of absolute possession, which Rosamund, comedian as she was, infused into her voice, was irresistible, and Sid laughed, laughed for joy that the girl he loved had such attractive brains as well.

“What a delightful fancy!” he exclaimed.

“Fancy, do you call it? Try and escape, my boy, and you will see how much of a fancy it is.”

“Divine, adorable fact, of course, I mean. O Rosamund, how glad I am that it is true. Let us take the key and throw it into the river. I never want to be free again as long as I live!”

“No use if you did!” with a saucy toss of the confident little head.

“My poor boy,” she went on presently, in a caressing motherly tone, “I really can’t help being rather sorry for you, you who have been so used to your freedom; you such a wicked, wicked wanderer. How will you ever endure it? Tell me the truth now—man to man, as they say—right at the bottom of your heart, aren’t you just a tiny bit wistful sometimes for the old freedom?”

“Never,” answered Sid, with portentous sincerity.

“Never! Quite sure? Don’t you ever feel a little homesick for some one of your old loves, and wonder what it would be like to see her again?”

Sid shook his head with emphasis.

Rosamund, and for that matter, all Sid’s world, was well acquainted with the main lines of his amatorious history, and knew something of the various divinities who had figured in it. Besides, Sid, a promising young lawyer, with known literary leanings, had put his heart on record beyond withdrawal by the publication of a volume of verse entitled “The Nine Muses.” The volume consisted of love-verses addressed to various ladies to whom Sid had from time to time, or simultaneously, been devoted; and though, of course, they figured under fanciful names, their identities were no secret to the learned gossips of Sid’s circle. This book had been a thorn in Sid’s side since he had met and loved Rosamund, a thorn which she sometimes amused herself by using to his discomfiture. She had the volume with her this afternoon, and as she turned to it, with malicious merriment in her eye, Sid knew that she meditated some of her merciless raillery.

“I do wish, Rosamund, you would let me forget that wretched book. I wish it were at the bottom of the sea. I’ll have the whole edition destroyed. I will, to-morrow....”

“O that would be sacrilege!” interrupted Rosamund, mockingly; “besides, I should still have my copy.”

“I will manage to get it from you,” retorted Sid, making a clutch at his printed past.

“Even if you should,” answered Rosamund, retaining possession of the book, “I should still remember some of the poems by heart. They are so beautiful.... This, for instance, to ‘Myrtilla’....”

“Do be quiet, Rosamund....”

“No, I insist, ... I don’t think you know how beautiful they are yourself. Listen:

“Truly now,” Rosamund continued, “doesn’t hearing that make you a bit thirsty again for your little starlit spring? It is not too late. I am sure that if you were to go back to her, she would let you drink all you want.... I happen to know that she isn’t married yet?”

Sid sat dumb under the raillery, with set, gloomy face. Turning over a page or two, Rosamund began again.

“Here is one of my favourites,” she said, ignoring Sid’s silence. “It is to Meriel:

As she finished reading this, Rosamund let the book close in her lap, and her mood seemed suddenly to have changed to a thoughtful seriousness. She repeated, as if to herself, the last two lines.

she said over slowly, as though weighing every word; and there was something in her voice that might have suggested that in playfully pressing this thorn into Sid’s side, she had unexpectedly pricked herself. Sid sat on in the same attitude of patient gloom. Presently, observing her silence, he turned to her.

“Are you finished?” he said.

“Yes!” she answered. “Yes!” with a certain aloofness in her voice, which Sid, with the painful sensitiveness of a lover, did not miss.

“Is there anything the matter?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, speaking slowly, and with the same serious quietness of tone, as though she were thinking hard. “No! but I’ve got an idea. That last poem has set me thinking....”

“Curse the poem,” exclaimed Sid desperately, seizing hold of the volume.

“You can take it,” said Rosamund, to his surprise, “I don’t think I want to see it again either.”

“But surely, you are not allowing it to trouble you. It is all past and gone, and one cannot have reached thirty without some experiences. Even you, dear....”

“O yes, I know, but there’s a peculiarly deep ring about those last two lines, Sid—