or in their subsequent
divorces, if such events should come about. But society cares nothing
whatever about maiden heart-throbbings. It is vaguely and generally
assumed that all girls begin by falling in love with the wrong person,
and then soberise down for matrimony and by matrimony, and that it does
not matter in the least what their silly first fancies were. Even the
father and mother of some particular girl will not take her early
love-fancies very seriously. She will get over it, they say
contentedly--perhaps with self-cherished, half-suppressed recollection
of the fact that he and she have themselves got over such a feeling and
been very happy, or at least fairly happy, after, in their married
lives.

But to Helena Langley things looked differently. She was filled with the
conviction that it would be a shame to her if the world--her world--were
to discover that she had fallen in love with a man who had not fallen in
love with her. The world would have taken the news with exactly the same
amount of interest, alarm, horror, that it would have felt if
authoritatively informed that Helena Langley had had the toothache. In
the illustration just given of a morbid, nervous condition, the sufferer
dreads that anyone moving rapidly in his direction is going to rush in
upon him and collide with him. But the rapid mover is thinking not at
all of the nervous sufferer, and would be only languidly interested if
he were told of the suffering, and would think it an ordinary and
commonplace sort of suffering after all--just what everybody has at one
time or another, don't you know?

Was Helena unhappy? On the whole, no--decidedly not. She had found her
hero. She had found out her passion. A new inspiration was breathed into
her life. This Undine of the West End, of the later end of the outworn
century had discovered the soul that was in her formerly undeveloped
system. She had come in for a possession like the possession of a
throne, which brings heavy responsibility and much peril and pain with
it, but yet which those who have once possessed it will not endure to be
parted from. She could follow _his_ fortunes--she could openly be his
friend--she felt a kind of claim on him and proprietorial right over
him. She had never felt any particular use in her existence before,
except, indeed, in amusing herself, and, let it be added in fairness to
the child, in giving pleasure to others, and trying to do good for
others.

But now sh