It was with very curious feelings that I went next day to see Minna. Truly she looked magnificent in her black clothes. Her curves had become ampler, her complexion deeper, perhaps a little coarse, and her drawl was more pronounced. Her husband came in while I was there. The poor man was indeed a changed Quaker. He seemed to have shrivelled. When she put her hand on his shoulder, I noticed with surprise that he jibbed away and seemed to avoid the gaze of her rather short-sighted, beautiful brown eyes that had grown appreciably warmer. It was strange indeed--his body had become so meagre and hers had so splendidly increased! We made no mention of the tragedy while he was there, but when he had left us I hazarded the question: “How is poor little Willy?” Her eyes shone, and she said, with a sort of beautiful earnestness: “You mustn’t call him that. He’s not a bit unhappy. We hold the thought together. It’s coming wonderfully!” In a sudden outburst of sympathy I said: “I’m so sorry. It must be terrible for you all.” Her brow contracted just a little. “Yes! I can’t get Tom--if only he would see that it’s nothing, really--that there’s no such thing as the body. He’s simply wearing himself away; he’s grown quite thin; he’s----” She stopped. And there rose up in me a kind of venom, as if I felt that she was about to say ‘--no longer fit to be my mate.’ And, trying to keep that feeling out of my eyes, I looked at the magnificent creature. How marvellously she had flourished under the spell of her creed! How beautifully preserved and encased against the feelings of this life she had become! How grandly she had cured her sensitive and neurasthenic girlhood! How nobly, against the disease of self-consciousness and self-absorption, she had put on the armour of a subtler and deeper self-absorption! And suddenly I pitied or I envied her--Ah! which? For, to achieve immunity from her own suffering, I perceived that for the suffering of others she had become incapable of caring two brass buttons. THE VOICE OF----! The proprietor of “The Paradise” had said freely that she would “knock them.” Broad, full-coloured, and with the clear, swimming eye of an imaginative man, he was trusted when he spoke thus of his new “turns.” There was the feeling that he had once more discovered a good thing. And on the afternoon of the new star’s dress rehearsal it was noticed that he came down to watch her, smoking his cigar calmly in the front row of the stalls. When she had finished and withdrawn, the _chef d’orchestre_, while folding up his score, felt something tickling his ear. “Bensoni, this is hot goods!” Turning that dim, lined face of his, whose moustache was always coming out of wax, Signor Bensoni answered: “A bit of all right, boss!” “If they hug her real big to-night, send round to my room.” “I will.”