eat advantage to unfold his plans to Miss
Helen Minorkey. Miss Helen loved to hear him talk. His enthusiasm was the
finest thing she had found, out of books. It was like a heroic poem, as
she often remarked, this fine philanthropy of his, and he seemed to her
like King Arthur preparing his Table Round to regenerate the earth. This
compliment, uttered with the coolness of a literary criticism--and
nothing _could_ be cooler than a certain sort of literary criticism--this
deliberate and oft-repeated compliment of Miss Minorkey always set
Charlton's enthusiastic blood afire with love and admiration for the one
Being, as he declared, born to appreciate his great purposes. And the
Being was pleased to be made the partner of such dreams and hopes. In an
intellectual and ideal fashion she did appreciate them. If Albert had
carried out his great plans, she, as a disinterested spectator, would
have written a critical analysis of them much as she would have described
a new plant.

But whenever Charlton tried to excite in her an enthusiasm similar to his
own, he was completely foiled. She shrunk from everything like
self-denial or labor of any sort. She was not adapted to it, she assured
him. And he who made fierce war on the uselessness of woman in general
came to reconcile himself to the uselessness of woman in particular, to
apologize for it, to justify it, to admire it. Love is the mother of
invention, and Charlton persuaded himself that it was quite becoming in
such a woman as the most remarkably cultivated, refined, and intellectual
Helen Minorkey, to shrink from the drudgery of life. She was not intended
for it. Her susceptibilities were too keen, according to him, though
Helen Minorkey's susceptibilities were indeed of a very quiet sort. I
believe that Charlton, the sweeping radical, who thought, when thinking
on general principles, that every human-creature should live wholly for
every other human creature, actually addressed some "Lines to H.M.,"
through the columns of the _St. Paul Advertiser_ of that day, in which he
promulgated the startling doctrine that a Being such as was the aforesaid
H.M., could not be expected to come into contact with the hard realities
of life. She must content herself with being the Inspiration of the life
of Another, who would work out plans that should inure to the good of man
and the honor of the Being, who would inspire and sustain the Toiler. The
poem was considered very fine by H.M., thou