“But, Bibi dear, Mrs. Grey is simply behind the times. The _rationale_ of those enormous meals was not munificence, but that a horde of house-servants had to be fed at a second table.” Certainly Guy and his good spirits were excellent company. And Bessie came of a race of women used to gay girlhoods and to settling down thereafter, as a matter of course, into the best of house-mothers. But there was a difference between the domestic arts she had been taught as necessary to the future lady of a large household and the domestic industries she had to practise. Supervising and doing were not the same. For her mother, sewing and cooking had been accomplishments; for her they were work. She had to do things a lady didn't do. However, she was as fastidious about what she did for herself as about what was done for her. She was quick and efficient. People said Bessie Osbourne had the dearest home in town, was the best housekeeper, the most nicely dressed on nothing. You might know Bessie Hall would have the best of everything! And when Bessie began to wonder if that was true, she had entered the last circle of disappointment. The fact was that, after the first novelty, things seemed pretty much the same as before. Bessie Osbourne was not so different from Bessie Hall. She might have appreciated that as significant; but doubtless she had never heard the edifying jingle of the unfortunate youth who “wandered over all the earth” without ever finding “the land where he would like to stay,” and all because he was injudicious enough to take “his disposition with him everywhere he went.” It was as if she had been going in a circle from right to left, and, after a blare of drums and trumpets and a stirring “About--face!” she had found herself going in the same circle from left to right. It all came to the same thing, and that was nothing. Guy was apparently working hard; but, after all, in real life it seemed one did not plant the adepts' magic seed that sprouted, grew, bloomed, while you looked on for a moment. For herself, baking and stitching took all her time, without taking nearly all her interest, or seeming to matter much when all was said and done. If she neglected things, they went undone, or some one else did them; in any case Guy never complained. If she did what came up, each day was filled with meeting each day's demands. All their lives went into the means and preparation for living. Other people--Or was it really any different with them? Nine-tenths of the people nine-tenths of the time seemed to accomplish only a chance to exist. She had heard women complain that such was the woman's lot in order that men might progress. But it struck her very few men worked beyond the provision of present necessities, either. Was it all a myth, then--happiness, experience, romance? Was this all there was to life and love? What was the sense, the end? Her dissatisfaction reproached the Cosmos, grew to that _Weltschmerz_ which is