"My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like I've been doing to-night." The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, "God is good and I am God," many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a footnote to this picture may we not ask: Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they made--or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly miserable when they began to "live happily ever after"? A symposium entitled "Is Love Really Worth It?" by such distinguished characters as Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading, if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of dissimulation and deceit. But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we have the Morton family. The Captain's feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in the stove. It is May. But it is the Captain's habit to warm his feet there when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper; then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this: