rilogy! Miss Sarah O'Malley wore
the dresses in exuberant rotation, Mr. Morrissy read the emotional
poetry with great admiration, Mrs. Morrissy made friends with the dog,
and life at once became complex and joyful.

Mr. Morrissy, exhilarated by the emotional poetry, drew, with an
instinct too human to be censured, more and more in the direction of
his wife's cousin, and that lady, having a liking for comedy, observed
the agile posturings of the gentleman on a verbal summit up and down
and around which he flung himself with equal dexterity and
satisfaction--crudely, he made puns--and the two were further thrown
together by the enforced absences of Mrs. Morrissy, into a privacy more
than sealed, by reason of the attentions of a dog who would climb to
her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put to no more than temporary
rout the nimble guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Morrissy began to
look upon the toy terrier with a meditative eye.

It was from one of these, now periodical, retreats that Mrs. Morrissy
first observed the rapt attitude of her husband, and, instantly, life
for her became bounding, plentiful, and engrossing.

There is no satisfaction in owning that which nobody else covets. Our
silver is no more than second-hand, tarnished metal until some one else
speaks of it in terms of envy. Our husbands are barely tolerable until
a lady friend has endeavoured to abstract their cloying attentions.
Then only do we comprehend that our possessions are unique, beautiful,
well worth guarding.

Nobody has yet pointed out that there is an eighth sense; and yet the
sense of property is more valuable and more detestable than all the
others in combination. The person who owns something is civilised. It
is man's escape from wolf and monkeydom. It is individuality at last,
or the promise of it, while those other ownerless people must remain
either beasts of prey or beasts of burden, grinning with ineffective
teeth, or bowing stupid heads for their masters' loads, and all begging
humbly for last straws and getting them.

Under a sufficiently equable exterior Mrs. Morrissy's blood was pulsing
with greater activity than had ever moved it before. It raced! It
flew! At times the tide of it thudded to her head, boomed in her ears,
surged in fierce waves against her eyes. Her brain moved with a
complexity which would have surprised her had she been capable of
remarking upon it. Plot and counterplot! She wove webs horrid as a
spider