We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet, to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,--it was Victorian. But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen, and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand, saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter, and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid, both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh, mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!--a rat!" And she was not herself again until the next morning.