Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as
have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing. Keep that
till you see your trunk."

My clutch re-tightens.

"At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't
come back. You'll get to your journey's end just as soon."

"Shall I? Well, I will," compliant as usual.

"No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a
woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later or
a train earlier, and you can't meet her."

Pliant to the last touch I say aloud,--

"No, I must go in this train"; and so I go trunkless and crest-fallen to
meet Halicarnassus.

It is a dismal day, and Crene, to comfort me, puts into my hands two
books as companions by the way. They are Coventry Patmore's "Angel in
the House," "The Espousals and the Betrothal." I do not approve of
reading in the cars; but without is a dense, white, unvarying fog, and
within my heart it is not clear sunshine. So I turn to my books.

Did any one ever read them before? Somebody wrote a vile review of them
once, and gave the idea of a very puerile, ridiculous, apron-stringy
attempt at poetry. Whoever wrote that notice ought to be shot, for the
books are charming pure and homely and householdy, yet not effeminate.
Critics may sneer as much as they choose: it is such love as Vaughan's
that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not proof against
deterioration, because a large and long-continued infusion of gross
blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of rough, pitiless,
degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of
a soul, may change its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes
for beauty, women do exist, victims rather than culprits, coarse against
their nature, hard, material, grasping, the saddest sight humanity can
see. Such a woman can accept coarse men. They may come courting on all
fours, and she will not be shocked. But women in the natural state want
men to stand god-like erect, to tread majestically, and live delicately,
Women do not often make an ado about this. They talk it over among
themselves, and take men as they are. They quietly soften them down,
and smooth them out, and polish them up, and make the best of them, and
simply and sedulously shut their eyes and make believe there isn't any
worst, or reason it away,--a great deal more than I should think they
would. But if you want to