roudly assumed the functions of housekeeper; the
womanly instinct for these things is astonishing. A man would far
sooner not have things comfortable, than have the trouble of providing
them and seeing about them. Women do not care about comforts for
themselves; they prefer haphazard meals, trays brought into rooms,
vague arrangements; and yet they seem to know by instinct what a man
likes, even though he does not express it, and though he would not take
any trouble to secure it. What centuries of trained instincts must have
gone to produce this. The new order has given me a great deal more of
Maggie's society. We are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes
to be quite alone to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come
to see her, now that she cannot go to see them. She tells me frankly
that my presence only embarrasses them. And thus another joy has come
to me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in
my life, and which I can hardly find words to express--the contact
with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely pure, simple
and ingenuous girl. Maggie's mind has opened like a flower. She talks
to me with perfect openness of all she feels and thinks; to walk thus,
hour by hour, with my child's arm through my own, her wide-opened,
beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light step beside me, with all her
pretty caressing ways--it seems to me a taste of the purest and
sweetest love I have ever felt. It is like the rapture of a lover, but
without any shadow of the desirous element that mingles so fiercely and
thirstily with our mortal loves, to find myself dear to her. I have a
poignant hunger of the heart to save her from any touch of pain, to
smooth her path for her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness. I
did not guess that the world held any love quite like this; there seems
no touch of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for
nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams--how inexplicable, how adorable! She
said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a real
pity that she could not have children of her own without. "We don't
want any one else, do we, except just some little children to amuse
us." She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our amusements is to
tell each other long, interminable tales of the adventures of a family
we call the Pickfords. I have lost all count of