d myself envying his fate. After all, in the
course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved
romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal...

The End

MRS. MANSTEY'S VIEW

As first published in Scribner's Magazine, July, 1891

The view from Mrs. Manstey's window was not a striking one, but to her
at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the
back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-house, in a street
where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the
pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius. She was the widow of a
clerk in a large wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for
her only daughter had married in California, and could not afford the
long journey to New York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might
have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many
years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other's
society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of
a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter,
and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing
stiff with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter's
companionship, Mrs. Manstey's increasing infirmity, which caused her to
dread the three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would
have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey; and
without perhaps, formulating these reasons she had long since accepted
as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.

She was, indeed, not quite lonely, for a few friends still toiled up now
and then to her room; but their visits grew rare as the years went by.
Mrs. Manstey had never been a sociable woman, and during her husband's
lifetime his companionship had been all-sufficient to her. For many
years she had cherished a desire to live in the country, to have a
hen-house and a garden; but this longing had faded with age, leaving
only in the breast of the uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness
for plants and animals. It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her
cling so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the
most optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover anything
admirable.

Mrs. Manstey, from her coign of vantage (a slightly projecting
bow-window where she nursed an ivy and a succession of unwholesome-looking
bulbs), looked o