ER I

ONSLOW SQUARE

This is a romantic tale. So romantic is it that I shall be forced to
pry into the coy recesses of the mind in order to exhibit a connected,
reasonable affair, not only of a man and his wife prosperously seated
in the mean of things, _nel mezzo del cammin_ in space as well as
time--for the Macartneys belonged to the middle class, and were well
on to the middle of life themselves--, but of stript, quivering and
winged souls tiptoe within them, tiptoe for flight into diviner spaces
than any seemly bodies can afford them. As you peruse you may find it
difficult to believe that Macartney himself--James Adolphus, that
remarkable solicitor--could have possessed a quivering, winged soul
fit to be stript, and have hidden it so deep. But he did though, and
the inference is that everybody does. As for the lady, that is not so
hard of belief. It very seldom is--with women. They sit so much at
windows, that pretty soon their eyes become windows themselves--out of
which the soul looks darkling, but preening; out of which it sometimes
launches itself into the deep, wooed thereto or not by _aubade_ or
_serena_. But a man, with his vanity haunting him, pulls the blinds
down or shuts the shutters, to have it decently to himself, and his
looking-glass; and you are not to know what storm is enacting deeply
within. Finally, I wish once for all to protest against the fallacy
that piracy, brigandage, pearl-fishery and marooning are confined to
the wilder parts of the habitable globe. Never was a greater, if more
amiable, delusion fostered (to serve his simplicity) by Lord Byron and
others. Because a man wears trousers, shall there be no more cakes and
ale? Because a woman subscribes to the London Institution, desires the
suffrage, or presides at a Committee, does the _bocca baciata perde
ventura_? Believe me, no. There are at least two persons in each of
us, one at least of which can course the starry spaces and inhabit
where the other could hardly breathe for ten minutes. Such is my own
experience, and such was the experience of the Macartney pair--and now
I have done with exordial matter.

The Macartneys had a dinner-party on the twelfth of January. There
were to be twelve people at it, in spite of the promised assistance of
Lancelot at dessert, which Lucy comforted herself by deciding would
only make twelve and a half, not thirteen. She told that to her
husband, who fixed more firmly his eyeglass, and grunted, "I'