ader in the fate of different members of our company. Here are our
pretty Delilah and our Doctor provided for. We may take it for granted
that it will not be very long that the young couple will have to wait;
for, as I have told you all, the Doctor is certainly getting into
business, and bids fair to have a thriving practice before he saddles
his nose with an eyeglass and begins to think of a pair of spectacles.
So that part of our little domestic drama is over, and we can only
wish the pair that is to be all manner of blessings consistent with
a reasonable amount of health in the community on whose ailings must
depend their prosperity.

All our thoughts are now concentrated on the relation existing between
Number Five and the Tutor. That there is some profound instinctive
impulse which is drawing them closer together no one who watches them
can for a moment doubt. There are two principles of attraction which
bring different natures together: that in which the two natures closely
resemble each other, and that in which one is complementary of the
other. In the first case, they coalesce, as do two drops of water or
of mercury, and become intimately blended as soon as they touch; in the
other, they rush together as an acid and an alkali unite, predestined
from eternity to find all they most needed in each other. What is the
condition of things in the growing intimacy of Number Five and the
Tutor? He is many years her junior, as we know. Both of them look that
fact squarely in the face. The presumption is against the union of two
persons under these circumstances. Presumptions are strong obstacles
against any result we wish to attain, but half our work in life is to
overcome them. A great many results look in the distance like six-foot
walls, and when we get nearer prove to be only five-foot hurdles, to be
leaped over or knocked down. Twenty years from now she may be a vigorous
and active old woman, and he a middle-aged, half-worn-out invalid, like
so many overworked scholars. Everything depends on the number of
drops of the elixir vitae which Nature mingled in the nourishment she
administered to the embryo before it tasted its mother's milk. Think
of Cleopatra, the bewitching old mischief-maker; think of Ninon de
L'Enclos, whose own son fell desperately in love with her, not knowing
the relation in which she stood to him; think of Dr. Johnson's friend,
Mrs. Thrale, afterward Mrs. Piozzi, who at the age of eighty was full
e