hbourhood, one must feel the reflex of the shock. While
sympathy for Sylvia keeps the thing ever present, like a weight upon the
chest, I find myself wondering if anything could have been done to avert
the disaster, and we all rove about in a half unsettled condition. Half a
dozen times a day Lavinia Dorman starts up with the determination of
calling upon Sylvia, but this morning decided upon writing her a letter
instead, and having sent it up by Timothy Saunders, is now sitting out in
the arbour, while Martin Cortright is reading to her from his manuscript;
but her attention is for the first time divided, and she is continually
glancing up the road as if expecting a summons,--a state of things that
causes an expression of mild surprise and disappointment to cross
Martin's countenance at her random and inapropos criticisms. I see that
in my recent confusion I have forgotten to record the fact that Miss
Lavinia has fallen into the role of critic for Martin's book, and that
for the last ten days, as a matter of course, he reads to her every
afternoon the result of his morning's work, finding, as he says, that her
power of condensation is of the greatest help in enabling him to
eliminate much of the needless detail of his subject that blocked him,
and to concentrate his vitality upon the rest.

This all looks promising, to my romantic mind; for the beginning of all
kinds of affection, physical, mental, and spiritual, that are huddled
together in varying proportions as component parts of love, has its
origin in dependence. Father declares independence, selfishness, and
aloofness to be the trinity of hell. Now Martin Cortright has come to
depend upon Lavinia Dorman's opinion, and she is beginning not only to
realize and enjoy his dependence, but to aid and abet it. Is not this
symptomatic?

When I approach father upon the Latham affair, he says that he thinks the
rupture was inevitable from the point of view and conditions that
existed. He feels, from the evidence that long experience with the inner
life of households has given him, that though a thoughtless woman may be
brought to realize, and a woman with really bad inherited instincts
reclaimed, through love, the wholly selfish woman of Mrs. Latham's type
remains immovable to word of God or man, and is unreachable, save through
the social code of the class that forms her world, and this code
sanctions both the marriage and the divorce of convenience, and receives
the res