'If this were fiction, instead of a veracious study from life,' to make use of a phrase which one rarely finds out of a novel, it would be unfitting to let such an incident as that just related fall to the ground, except as the seed of future development; but, this being as I have stated, there is nothing more to say of that winning _ouvrière_. Narcissus saw her no more. But surely, of all men, he could best afford that one such pleasant chance should put forth no other blossom save that half-dreamed kiss;--and how can one ever foresee but that our so cherishable spray of bloom may in time add but another branch to that orchard of Dead Sea fruit which grows inevitably about all men's dwellings? I do not suppose that Narcissus was really as exceptional in the number and character of his numerous boyish loves as we always regarded him as being. It is no uncommon matter, of course and alas! for a youth between the ages of seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three, or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon, has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to buds, to the blossoming of all those words of love that press for birth,' when, as a matter of fact, he has been unblushingly eating the lotus, in the laziest chair at home, in the quietest night of summer. Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male; invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament. Yet I do not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of _philosophes_, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it is called--yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a story of that sort--well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the completion of the half-century.