says, and there couldn't be anything so very dreadful to hear in the little composition of an innocent young creature like that!"

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

Fraulein Lilian Macfarlane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lady —— was nearly frantic at this