ho was
henceforward to fill up all her lover's thoughts and speak to him in
every sight and sound, but just the human Jenny, with her faults
and all.

On these--such little faults!--Theophil ever loved to dwell. They saved
Jenny from becoming an abstraction, a saint. Even those bitter little
quarrels which all lovers must suffer,--how sweet they seemed now!

The old mother's method was no doubt again different from her
son-in-law's. She would never have admitted that Jenny had a fault.
Such is the difference in reality between the new idealism and the old.

In such small matters as the minutiae of mourning that difference was
again illustrated. Theophil could permit himself no outward insignia of
sorrow which he could not wear for ever. Already his profession had
clothed him in black, and it was only for him that his black seemed now
to gain a deeper distinction; but such ugly symbols of beautiful memory
as that note-paper whose diminishing edge of blackness is rather a
cynical witness of a graduated forgetfulness, were not for a real grief
like his. As if sorrow, while it may and will change, can ever end! Why,
in the world of faithful hearts, men and women have not yet dried their
tears for Romeo and Juliet!

Theophil conceived this grief that had come to him as one more activity
added to his life till life should end. He knew that it would not
outcast joy, but that it would live side by side with it, that it must
alternate with joy for it to go on living. Jenny's death was not going
to be less sad, less a factor of the eternal tragedy, at the end of a
year,--that he might go to a theatre once more, as some widows joyously
don colours, when the clock strikes the end of a year of lost dances.

For it was not Jenny alone that had died, but it was a consolation to
Theophil in those hours of self-torture which are among the earliest and
most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had
died with her, after all. It was not merely the apathy of the first
weeks that told him this, the sense of vacuity, of uselessness in all
things, but the sense that never left him, even when he had awakened to
an activity he had never known before, that nothing really mattered,
however vigorously he might seem to act to the contrary, since Jenny
had gone.

It was with difficulty sometimes that he could take important issues
with necessary seriousness, for, whatever the odds of life henceforward
might be, what was t