of associate life and labor, wherein all selfishness should be suppressed, justice and all the beatitudes reign, and souls develop all their capabilities scarce conscious of even the body's hampering; but that practically the only successful lay experiment in communism I had ever heard of was that early one of the Indians in Paraguay under the care of the Jesuit missionaries--Phalansterians who wore their rosaries around their necks because they had no pockets in which to carry them! And I thought that people without bonds of kinship or close sympathy would not happily bear being forced into incessant, intimate companionship unless they were either saints or prodigies of imperturbable courtesy. Well, life was a choice of evils, she answered me, and their experiment had so far succeeded very well. But I might judge for myself a little: would I, with my husband, dine with them on either one of such and such days the next week, to meet this confederate household assembled? This was an advance I had not counted on. My especial interest was in the child, and though I liked well enough for myself accepting an invitation that promised to be something out of the common way in dinners, I was hardly prepared to pledge Ronayne. He not only likes a good dinner, and feels injured when he doesn't get it, but he is very particular as to the society in which he eats it. He can be gloriously jolly and informal when he likes; but he wouldn't be his father's son if he weren't what I call just a bit snobbish about the people he will know in England--London especially. But if he was going in for the correct thing, why on earth did he insist upon marrying me? Because I never was the correct thing, and he fell it love with me when he was quite old enough to know better; and after his friends had for years reckoned him as a fastidious, foreordained bachelor; _he_ says because I was so wholly unlike the young ladies of his generation that he was surprised out of himself. And mamma told him all my faults that he didn't know already, and how people had insisted before upon marrying me, and two or three times I had been silly enough to half think I would let them, and then backed out and vowed I would have no husband but Art--and was generally so impressed with the risks he ran that I believe she even wept over his prospective unhappiness. But he would have his way; he didn't want a housekeeper; he didn't want a well informed young lady; his shirt-buttons and stocking-darning weren't likely to depend upon his wife; he should hate a patient Grizzle; he didn't marry for his friends--you can imagine the rash arguments. But I gave him a last chance of escape, for the night before we were married; when I'd given away all my old clothes, and the license was bought, the ring in his breast-pocket, and the wedding breakfast being laid in the next room, I said to him before all of them in papa's study: