would have in it some spirit, some earnest, something worth while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Adam! And why not? Because I'm, unluckily, married, am I to stop trying to improve myself, and not care to know what grand heights happier, unhampered women are scaling? And, Adam, only see, here's to be a paper read by a young lady only twenty-two, Mr. Malise