"The familiarity of the marriage state, if it does not breed positive contempt on the part of the angel, engenders at times, I think, a considerable craving for change on the side of both parties. We men are poor creatures at the best--I always pity your Euphemia. Married people, for instance, always get too much of each other's conversation. They do not have sufficient opportunity to recuperate their topics from original sources. They get interested in outside people, merely from a perfectly legitimate desire to get some amusing novel ideas for each other, and then comes jealousy. I sometimes think that if Adam and Eve had been merely engaged, she would not have talked with the serpent; and the world had been saved an infinity of misery. "No, George: engagements for me. It is the state we were made for. I have delayed this matter all too long. But, thank heaven, I am engaged at last--I hope for all the rest of my life. Now, will you not congratulate me?" "It may be very nice as you put it, but engagements end as well as begin," I insisted. "You cannot be a law unto yourself in these matters. When will you get married?" "Good Heavens!" exclaimed my uncle. "Get married and end this delightful state! You don't think she will want me to marry her, do you? Besides, she told me some time ago that she did not intend to marry again. It was only that encouraged me to suggest an engagement to her. Though she is a wonderful woman, George--a wonderful woman. Still, I think she looks at things very much as I do." He paused thoughtfully. Then added with fervour, "At least I hope so." LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI A RHAPSODY I found him in his own apartments, and strangely disordered. He went to and fro, raving--beginning so soon as I entered the room. I noticed a book half out of its cover, flung carelessly into the corner of the room. "I am enchanted of an impalpable woman, George," he said, "I am in bonds to a spirit of the air. I can neither think nor work nor eat nor sleep because of her. Sometimes I go out suddenly, tramping through seething streets, through fog and drizzle or dry east wind, mourning for her sake. My life is rapidly becoming one colourless melancholy through her spells and twining sorceries. I sometimes wish that I were dead. "Yet I have never seen her. Often, indeed, I imagine her, anon as of this shape, and anon of that. I know her only by her victims, those she slays daily, and daily revives to slay. They come to me with their complaints, mutilated, pathetic, terrible. I try to shut my ears to them in vain. I have tried wool, but it made little or no difference.