h her to submit her
sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of
the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from. "As the
husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife
of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did, from
the few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very
probably. He looked like one of those young men who are sharp and hard
enough to come to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the
great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the
animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and
the sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial
fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired
of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances,
without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being
utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season
would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate
monotony of dressing, dawdling, and driving!

* * * * *

This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed a red curtain so as
to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which his
fancy turned to the semblance of life. He would sit and look at the
features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if
the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as if they
were ready to speak to him. His companions began to whisper strange
things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an unnatural
light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in short, that
there was a look as if something were going wrong with his brain, which
it might be feared would spoil his fine intelligence. It was the
undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his noblest moments he had
considered the growing passion, was getting the better of him.

He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled and
whispered away his peace, when the postman brought him a letter. It was
from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise. We know how she
used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent feelings, and the
trifling matters that were going on in her little village world. But now
she wrote in sadness. Something, she did not too clear