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 _not_ 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 o