ould be scoured by the world's yearly output of
scrubbing-brushes. I don't blame her for it any more than I blame her
for a love of radishes, which make me ill; it is not as if she had no
wholesome tastes. On the contrary, I commend her. Now, Willoughby, it
seems, has found the public appetite so great for these thought-saving
boluses of knowledge--unpleasant drugs, as it were, put up into gelatine
capsules--that he needs assistance. He has asked Judith to devil for
him, and I have to-day persuaded her to accept his offer. It will be an
excellent thing for the dear woman. It will be an absorbing occupation.
It will divert the current of her thoughts from the sentimentality that
I deprecate, and provided she does not serve up hard-boiled facts to me
at dinner, she will be the pleasanter companion.

The only return to it was when I kissed her at parting.

"That is the first, Marcus, for twelve hours," she said; very sweetly,
it is true--but still reproachfully.

But Sacred Name of a Little Good Man! (as the depraved French people
say), what is the use of this continuous osculation between rational
beings of opposite sexes who set out to enjoy themselves? If only St.
Paul, in the famous passage when he says there is a time for this and a
time for that, had mentioned kissing, he would have done a great deal of
practical good.

July 13th.

To-night, for the first time since I came into the family estates (such
as they are), I feel the paralysis of aspiration occasioned by poverty.
If I were very rich, I would buy the two next houses, pull them down and
erect on the site a tower forty foot high. At the very top would be one
comfortable room to be reached by a lift, and in this room I could have
my being, while it listed me, and be secure from all kinds of incursions
and interruptions. Antoinette's one-eyed cat could not scratch for
admittance; Antoinette herself could not enter under pretext of domestic
economics and lure me into profitless gossip; and I could defy Carlotta,
who is growing to be as pervasive as the smell of pickles over Crosse
& Blackwell's factory. She comes in without knocking, looks at
picture-books, sprawls about doing nothing, smokes my best cigarettes,
hums tunes which she has picked up from barrel-organs, bends over me to
see what I am writing, munching her eternal sweetmeats in my ear, and
laughs at me when I tell her she has irremediably broken the thread of
my ideas. Of course I might be brut