tterly
happy, and utterly selfish with the immemorial selfishness of lovers,
who cannot for a moment conceive that the whole world is not somehow
benefited by their happiness and does not await with breathless
interest the outcome of their bickerings with the blind bow-god, and
from this providential delusion derive a meritorious and comfortable
glow. So Mrs. Saumarez and Mr. Kennaston parted from Margaret with
kindness, it is true, but not without awkwardness.

And that was the man that almost she had loved! thought Margaret, as
she gazed on the whirl of dust left by their carriage-wheels. Gone
with a few perfunctory words of sympathy!

And for my part, I think that the base Indian who threw a pearl away
worth more than all his tribe was, in comparison with Felix Kennaston,
a shrewd and long-headed man. If you had given _me_ his chances,
Margaret ... but this, however, is highly digressive.

The Colonel, standing beside her, used language that was unrefined.
His aspirations as to the future of Mr. Kennaston and Mr. Jukesbury,
it appeared, were both lurid and unfriendly.

"But why, attractive?" queried his daughter.

"May they be qualified with such and such adjectives!" desired the
Colonel, fervently. "They tried to lend me money--wouldn't hear of
my not taking it! In case of necessity.' Bah!" said the Colonel, and
shook his fist after the retreating carriages. "May they be qualified
with such and such adjectives!"

How happily she laughed! "And you're swearing at them!" she pouted.
"Oh, my dear, my dear, how hard you are on all my little friends!"

"Of course I am," said the Colonel, stoutly. "They've deprived me of
the pleasure of despising 'em. It was worth double the money, I tell
you! I never objected to any men quite so much. And now they've gone
and behaved decently with the deliberate purpose of annoying me! Oh!"
cried the Colonel, and shook an immaculate, withered old hand toward
the spring sky, "may they be qualified with such and such adjectives!"

And that, so far as we are concerned, was the end of Margaret's
satellites.

My dear Mrs. Grundy, may one point the somewhat obvious moral? I thank
you, madam, for your long-suffering kindness. Permit me, then, to
vault toward my moral over the shoulders of a greater man.

Among the papers left by one Charles Dickens--a novelist who is
obsolete now because he "wallows naked in the pathetic" and was
frequently guilty of a very vulgar sort of humour that