If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be; but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the hidden face. "My dear soul!" her husband more than once implored her, "do but wait till we're as poor as church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again; then I'll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasure." And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely, "How long will it be before we're without a farthing in the house?" But to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: "If that is your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one again; in which case, of course, you can _never_ enjoy one. What king or emperor--ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowns under his tail--can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet he passes his happy day in his _Sans Souci_, or his _Bellevue_ (or whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life." (She shook her head). "I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek." And, opening the New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself on the spur of the moment): "If, in a time of good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age."