smuch
as her opposition to the marriage now logically fell to the ground. It's
all tears and laughter as I look back upon that admirable time, in which
nothing was so romantic as our intense vision of the real. No
fool's paradise ever rustled such a cradle-song. It was anything but
Bohemia--it was the very temple of Mrs. Grundy. We knew we were too
critical, and that made us sublimely indulgent; we believed we did our
duty or wanted to, and that made us free to dream. But we dreamed over
the multiplication-table; we were nothing if not practical. Oh, the long
smokes and sudden ideas, the knowing hints and banished scruples! The
great thing was for Limbert to bring out his next book, which was just
what his delightful engagement with the _Beacon_ would give him
leisure and liberty to do. The kind of work, all human and elastic
and suggestive, was capital experience: in picking up things for
his bi-weekly letter he would pick up life as well, he would pick
up literature. The new publications, the new pictures, the new
people--there would be nothing too novel for us and nobody too
sacred. We introduced everything and everybody into Mrs. Stannace's
drawing-room, of which I again became a familiar.

Mrs. Stannace, it was true, thought herself in strange company; she
didn't particularly mind the new books, though some of them seemed
queer enough, but to the new people she had decided objections. It was
notorious however that poor Lady Robeck secretly wrote for one of the
papers, and the thing had certainly, in its glance at the doings of the
great world, a side that might be made attractive. But we were going to
make every side attractive, and we had everything to say about the sort
of thing a paper like the _Beacon_ would want. To give it what it would
want and to give it nothing else was not doubtless an inspiring, but it
was a perfectly respectable task, especially for a man with an appealing
bride and a contentious mother-in-law. I thought Lambert's first letters
as charming as the type allowed, though I won't deny that in spite of my
sense of the importance of concessions I was just a trifle disconcerted
at the way he had caught the tone. The tone was of course to be caught,
but need it have been caught so in the act? The creature was even
cleverer, as Maud Stannace said, than she had ventured to hope. Verily
it was a good thing to have a dose of the wisdom of the serpent. If it
had to be journalism--well, it _was_ journ