“Your judgment is misled by your sympathies, Mrs. Buzzell,” said the banker’s lady. “Do you not see that if unmarried mothers and their children are to be respected, there is no safety for legal wives and legitimate children? If society comes to recognize the position of mistress as respectable, to be a wife will be a very questionable honor.” “Well, I sometimes think it is,” said Mrs. Buzzell, turning over in her mind this new and practical view of the case, and forgetting, in a kind of dreamy retrospection, that a moment before she had intended to smite Mrs. Kendrick “hip and thigh.” “They think we lose our youth when we begin to fade a little,” said Mrs. Kendrick, “when in fact we are then more sensitive than ever to the better part of love; and having a baby makes a very baby of a woman in this respect. Do what we will, though, we cannot keep the very element in a man’s love without which we don’t care for his love at all; and children hardly prove the consolation we expect, except, indeed, when they are babies. When they grow older they go from us, they wound us, and seem to spend half their lives fighting against our desires. After all, it is better to keep our thoughts beyond this world. I find, myself, very little pleasure in it.” It was very seldom that Mrs. Kendrick gave any expression to the dark under-current of her life. She passed for a very happy woman, and Mrs. Forest considered her position every way enviable. Her husband was rich, as all husbands should be in her opinion, as a duty they owe to society, and he was never known to be eccentric in anything. Mrs. Forest would have found him perfect. As a young man he had been enthusiastic, loved art and poetry, and talked of high purposes in life. He had even written very fair verses himself, and his wife, before marriage and some time after, had adored him; but he had in time so changed the diet of his soul, that whereas it once seemed wholly to feed upon grand aspirations, and upon the beautiful in all things, it now gorged itself upon bonds and stocks, and assimilated vast quantities of the nutriment. His romantic wife became practical too, but she was bitter over the loss of her illusions, and turned the whole current of her life into social ambition. She had the finest establishment in the county, and she seemed to study day and night to show her husband how dependent she was upon society—how little upon him—for her sum of happiness. For years they had ceased to wound each other’s vanity, as married people do after the romance is outlived and the conjugal yoke begins to gall them. It was not worth the trouble. Society held them up as shining examples of conjugal felicity. They always spoke of each other before the world in a tone of reserve, as if the nature of their mutual relations was too sacred to be questioned or discussed. And yet, with all this outside homage and interior luxury, with all her fine carriages and horses,