when she was asked to play, she would say she could not--she could only accompany herself. A likely story--as if any one who could do that as she could, could not play anything!--and we used to hear her, too, when she was in her own house, with nobody there but her husband. As for him, he overflowed with pride and delight in her music, and evidently much more than pleased her, and sometimes he even made her blush--a thing she rarely did--by his remarks, such as that if we really wanted to know how Loulou could sing, we must hide in the nursery. It was while singing to her baby, it appeared, that the great Giudotti had chanced to hear her, and immediately implored the privilege of teaching her, for anything or nothing. Minnie Mason said that it was impossible that a woman could sing like that unless she had a history; and she spent much of her time and all of her energy for several weeks in finding out what the history could be. It was wonderful how ingeniously she put this and that together, until one day at the club she told us the whole story, and we wondered that we had never thought of it before. It seems that before Loulie Latham was married there had been a love-affair between her and Walter Dana. It is not known exactly how far it went, but her feelings were very much involved. She was too young, poor thing, and too simple, to know that Walter Dana was not at all a marrying man; he could not have afforded it, if he had wanted to ever so much. He was the sort of young man, you know, who never does manage to afford to marry, though in other respects he seemed to get on well enough. He had passed down through several generations of girls, and was now rather attentive, in a harmless, general sort of way, to the married women, and came to our dances. "And then," said Minnie, "when he did not speak, and she was so suddenly left alone, and nearly penniless, after her mother's death, and Willie Williams was so much in love with her, and so pressing--though I don't believe he was ever in love with her more than he was with a dozen other girls, only the circumstances were such, you know, that he could hardly help proposing, he's so generous and impulsive. But he is not exactly the sort of man to fall in love with, and his oddities have evidently worn upon her; and now she feels with bitter regret how different her life might have been if she could have waited till her uncle left her this money. Walter has got on better, and might be able to marry her now, and she is young still--only twenty-nine. It is the wreck of two lives, perhaps of three. Willie is most unsuspicious, but should he ever find out----" We all shuddered with pleasurable horror at the thought that we were to be spectators of a Russian novel in real life.