a hero. This lover’s personality grew with her growth and changed with every evolution of the mind that had given it birth; but, strangely enough, the lover himself had retained his proportions and lineaments from the day of his creation. Is it to be supposed that Hermia was wedded peacefully to her ideal, and that together they reigned over a vast dominion of loving and respectful subjects? Not at all. If there was one word in the civilized vocabulary that Hermia hated it was that word “marriage.” To her it was correlative with all that was commonplace; with a prosaic grind that ate and corroded away life and soul and imagination; with a dreary and infinite monotony. Bessie Mordaunt’s peaceful married life was hideous to her sister. Year after year,—neither change nor excitement, neither rapture nor anguish, nor romance nor poetry, neither ambition nor achievement, nor recognition nor power! Nothing of mystery, nothing of adventure; neither palpitation of daring nor quiver of secrecy; nothing but kisses of calm affection, babies, and tidies! 4,620 evenings of calm, domestic bliss; 4,620 days of placid, housewifely duties! To Hermia such an existence was a tragedy more appalling than relentless immortality. Bessie had her circle of friends, and in each household the tragedy was repeated; unless, mayhap, the couple were ill-mated, when the tragedy became a comedy, and a vulgar one at that.

Hermia’s hatred of marriage sprang not from innate immorality, but from a strongly romantic nature stimulated to abnormal extreme by the constant, small-beer wave-beats of a humdrum, uniform, ever-persisting, abhorred environment. If no marriage-bells rang over her cliffs and waters and through her castle halls, her life was more ideally perfect than any life within her ken which drowsed beneath the canopy of law and church. Regarding the subject from the point of view to which her nature and conditions had focused her mental vision, love needed the exhilarating influence of liberty, the stimulation of danger, and the enchantment of mystery.

Of men practically she knew little. There were young men in her sister’s circle, and Mordaunt occasionally brought home his fellow clerks; but Hermia had never given one of them a thought. They were limited and commonplace, and her reputation for intellectuality had the effect of making them appear at their worst upon those occasions when circumstances compelled them to talk to her. And she had not the beauty to win forgiveness for her brains. She appreciated this fact and it embittered her, little as she cared for her brother’s uninteresting friends, and sent her to the depths of her populous soul.

The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality.

IN THE GREEN ROOM OF LITERATURE.

Hermia’s imagination in its turn demanded a safety-valve; she found it necessary, occasionally, to put her dreams into substance and sequence. In other words she wrote. Not prose. She had neither the patience nor the desire. Nor did she write poetry. She believed that no woman, save perhaps time-enveloped Sappho, ever did, and she had no idea of adding her pseudonym to the list of failures. When her brain became overcharged, she dashed off verses, wildly romantic, and with a pen heated white. There was a wail and an hysterical passion in what she wrote that took the hearts of a large class of readers by storm, and her verses found prompt acceptance by the daily and weekly papers. She had as yet aspired to nothing higher. She was distinctly aware that her versification was crude and her methods faulty. To get her verses into the magazines they must be fairly correct and almost proper, and both attainments demanded an amount of labor distasteful to her impatient nature. Of late, scarcely a week had passed without the appearance of several metrical contributions over the signature “Quirus;” and the wail and the passion were growing more piercing and tumultuous. The readers were moved, interested, or amused, according to their respective natures.

The morning after the little arithmetical problem, Hermia arose early and sat down at her desk. She drew out a package of MS. and read it over twice, then determined to have a flirtation with the magazines. These verses were more skillful from a literary point of view than any of her previous work, because, for the sake of variety, she had plagiarized some good work of an English poet. The story was a charming one, dramatic, somewhat fragmentary, and a trifle less caloric than her other effusions. She revised it carefully, and mailed it, later in the day, to one of the leading New York magazines.

Two weeks passed and no answer came. Then, snatching at anything which offered its minimum of distraction, she determined to call on the editor. She had never presented herself to an editor before, fearing his betrayal of her identity; so well had she managed that not even Bessie knew she wrote; but she regarded the magazine editor from afar as an exalted being, and was willing to put her trust in him. She felt shy about acknowledging herself the apostle of beauty and the priestess of passion, but ennui conquered diffidence, and one morning she presented herself at the door of her editor’s den.

The editor, who was glancing over proofs, raised his eyes as she entered, and did not look overjoyed to see her. Nevertheless, he politely asked her to be seated. Poor Hermia by this time was cold with fright; her knees were shaking. She was used to self-control, however, and in a moment managed to remark that she had come to inquire about the fate of her poem. The editor bowed, extracted a MS. from a pigeon-hole behind him, and handed it to her.

“I cannot use it,” he said, “but I am greatly obliged to you, nevertheless. We are always grateful for contributions.”

He had a pleasant way of looking upon the matter as settled, but an ounce or two of Hermia’s courage had returned, and she was determined to get something more out of the interview than a glimpse of an editor.

“I am sorry,” she said, “but of course I expected it. Would you mind telling me what is the matter with it?”

Editors will not take the trouble to write a criticism of a returned manuscript, but they are more willing to air their views verbally than people imagine. It gives them an opportunity to lecture and generalize, and they enjoy doing both.

“Certainly not,” said the editor in question. “Your principal fault is that you are too highly emotional. Your verses would be unhealthy reading for my patrons. This is a family magazine, and has always borne the reputation of incorruptible morality. It would not do for us to print matter which a father might not wish his daughter to read. The American young girl should be the conscientious American editor’s first consideration.”

This interview was among the anguished memories of Hermia’s life. After her return home she thought of so many good things she might have said. This was one which she uttered