This young couple had compared views on Browning and Ruskin, but not on onions. They had long ago discussed poetry, philosophies, and art, as well as architecture and house furnishings, and they had found hitherto that their tastes were in most delightful accord. Mrs. Lyman was not prepared, therefore, for the frown that contracted her husband's handsome brows as he ejaculated: "Onions! Don't mention them. Excuse me from that purchase, please. They are abominable; not fit for human beings to eat. They ought to be banished from every respectable table." "I beg your pardon," Mrs. Lyman answered, with rising color, "but all do not agree in such a sweeping denunciation. Many of the best physicians consider them most nutritious and healthful." "Well, at all events, I shall not have my house polluted with the vile things. If there is anything that reminds one of a third-rate boarding-house, it is to get a whiff of onions the moment you enter the front door. It is vulgar and low. I can't see how any one of refined tastes can touch them. I hope you are not an onion eater, Nettie, because if you are, I fear you will have to abstain; I cannot abide them." Now Mrs. Annette Heyward Lyman was exceedingly fond of onions. She was not of the sort to declare that she was "passionately fond of them," but she did think a nice dish of boiled onions, pretty white ones, swimming in hot milk and butter, was just the thing to go with—stewed chicken, say. Then, she enjoyed thin slices of raw onions cut into vinegar; and crisp, green-topped young ones, dipped in salt and eaten with bread and butter, were just delicious. And yet, if Philip had mildly hinted that he had a special aversion for that vegetable, she would have declared, "I will eat no onions while the world standeth." But to attack them in this sharp way, to declare them vulgar, and, above all, to dictate to her what she should or should not eat, as if he were her master, and to say "my house!" it was too much, and she answered in an icy tone that "she must beg leave to differ; to her mind the onion was a most delicious vegetable, and she must reserve for herself the right of choice in this and in other matters." Their first quarrel! And all about an onion! What cares Satan whether it be an apple or an onion, so that he spoil the Edens? There were many more words quite as pungent as onions, and then there fell a silence between them that was not broken after Barbara had lighted the gas in the parlor, and drawn the table under the drop-light, and they were seated with books and newspapers. There was no reading done, but much ugly thinking. One line of it ran after this fashion: