"You mean let her work out her own destiny. That's all I was doing. I see your point; and, if you won't take her back, I'm willing to give her her head to the end. I'm interested in her, and I don't despair of her at all, in spite of the fact that you have washed your hands of her. I shall have to think a little before I give her her head again." Hereupon Josephine assumed an attitude of reflection. When she began to speak presently, her words and manner suggested the demeanor of a trance medium, or seer--as though she were peering into the abyss of the future. "The interview appears, and her husband is less disturbed than she expects. He declares that the press portrait is an abomination and libellous, but he admits that the text is considerately done for a newspaper interview, and that, barring a few inaccuracies and a little exaggeration due to poetic license, she is made to appear less of a fool than she had a right to expect. This cheers and encourages her, and helps to allay the consciousness that the publication of her face and doings was purely a gratuitous advertisement. She firmly resolves that she will reform and live up to the description of her, and she resolves to devote herself to a more definite field of action. Accordingly, after deliberation, she rejects the case of the blind, and decides to take up the problem of how to make humble homes attractive by simple art. She buys a complete edition of Ruskin, and writes to a half-dozen prominent men and as many women for the use of their names as a nucleus for a club to be known as "The Home Beautifying Society." A meeting is held, and she is elected President and a member of the Executive Committee, facts of which the public is duly informed by her pathetic newspaper admirer. There, philosopher, you see she is doing something serious already." "You are incorrigible, Josephine," I asserted. "She means so well, poor dear," my wife continued with a genuinely worried air. "She fully intends to devote herself to that society and make it a success, and she does so for a few weeks. Indeed, she raises money enough to employ a superintendent, and through him to give an exhibition of a poor man's house as it ought to be furnished, and by way of speaking contrast a poor man's house as it is too apt to be furnished when he has money enough to furnish it gaudily. And then she helps get out the annual report, which mentions progress, and shows a balance of $1.42 in the treasury, which leads her to make the announcement that in order to insure the successful continuation of a movement calculated to serve as a potent æsthetic influence among the unenlightened, the liberal contributions made by friends must be renewed in the fall. And then, there are so many other things she has to do. Just listen, philosopher, to what the poor thing has become in less than a year since her life appeared in the newspaper, and tell me what she is to do.