Sometimes it seemed to me too much to hope for, that she should live to be my wife; that the fabulous joy of possession should ever be mine. Each morning I left my bunch of fresh violets with a greeting in it at her door, and assured myself that the earth yet retained her, and all day long I worked with the under-thought of the little boudoir where I should meet her in the evening. Who says modern New York life is prosaic? The everlasting poem of man and woman is as fresh there at this hour as among the crocuses and violets of Eden. A graceful writer, in one of our late magazines, speaks of the freedom which a young man feels when he has found the mistress and queen of his life. He is bound to no other service, he is anxious about no other smile or frown. I had been approved and crowned by my Queen of Love and Beauty. If _she_ liked me, what matter about the rest? It did not disturb me a particle to feel that I was submitted to as a necessity, rather than courted as a blessing, by her parents. I cared nothing for cold glances or indifferent airs so long as my golden-haired Ariadne threw me the clew by which I threaded the labyrinth, and gave me the talisman by which to open the door. Once safe with her in her little "Italy," the boudoir in which we first learned to know each other, we laughed and chatted, making ourselves a gay committee of observation on the whole world besides. Was there anybody so fortunate as we? and was there any end to our subject-matter for conversation? "You have no idea, Harry," she said to me, the first evening after our engagement had been declared, "what a time we've been having with Aunt Maria! You know she is mamma's oldest sister, and mamma is one of the gentle, yielding sort, and Aunt Maria has always ruled and reigned over us all. She really has a way of ordering mamma about, and mamma I think is positively afraid of her. Not that she's really ill-tempered, but she is one of the sort that thinks it's a matter of course that she should govern the world, and is perfectly astonished when she finds she can't. I have never resisted her before, because I have been rather lazy, and it's easier to give up than to fight; and besides one remembers one's catechism, and doesn't want to rise up against one's pastors and masters." "But you thought you had come to a place where amiability ceased to be a virtue?" said I. "Exactly. Ida always said that people must have courage to be disagreeable, or they couldn't be good for much; and so I put on all my terrors, and actually bullied Aunt Maria into submission." "You must have been terrific," said I, laughing.