h and beauty. Seventeen cannot well realize,
to-night at Mrs. Pearl Dowlas's hop, when Mr. Pearl Dowlas, the eminent
merchant, supposed to be worth a million, caresses his handsome
side-whiskers with his faultless hand and interchanges pleasant nothings
with the fashionable women who all admire him and all hate his
wife,--that Mr. Pearl Dowlas is suffering, all the while, the intense
agonies of ruin, and that he has the revolver already loaded and capped
with which he intends to blow out his brains after the last carriage has
rolled away. And Seventeen will be quite as slow to discover, unless
Seventeen has lived too fast for her own self-respect and eventual
happiness, that Lady Flora, patting her white-gloved hands to-night at
the Opera, with the blonde Emperor by her side, apparently the happiest
and the most truly envied woman in all that brilliant house, has such
pangs of rage and jealousy tugging at her heart-strings, when she looks
over at a much plainer woman in the opposite row of boxes, that could
the terror of the law be removed, she would sacrifice self-respect,
dignity, hope, everything, and bury a knife in the heart of that plainer
woman as they brush by each other in the lobby. Seventeen will be slow
to discover these things. Twenty-five may have a nearer appreciation of
them, though yet dim as compared with the reality alas!--it needs
Forty-five or Fifty, or a younger age made so old by sad
experience--Forty-five or Fifty, with the bloom gone, the gray hair here
and the wrinkles coming, to look beneath the surface and see the agony
writhing at the bottom. Thank God that some agonies never can be
discovered at all, until they break forth in uncontrollable madness: the
world might be sadder if we _could_ look in through transparent flesh
into our neighbors' hearts, as we do through glass windows into their
houses!

"_Strida la Vampa_" had been bravely whistled. Not braver the conduct of
the poor cartman at the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly
on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of
the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed
them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery,
or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a
bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and
undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer
most interested. Though he had r