and Seltzer, while on other occasions he would sit apart glowering moodily on the company, and refusing to taste any thing stronger than water. Sigismund was very good to this stricken deer. Sometimes, when Philip had taken a homely dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, and when the novelist had been working hard all day, the two young men paced the streets and squares of the Bloomsbury district together in gloaming and gaslight, and discoursed with brotherly confidence and freedom. "I tell you she isn't worth the howling you make about her--_le jeu ne vaut pas_--the what's-its-name," said the practical Sigismund. "What is she but a little fair-haired chit, with dark eyebrows and big grey eyes, and the insolent turned-up nose of a Palais-Royal _soubrette_? What is she but a mercenary little adventuress? Yes, though she lives under her father's roof, and shelters her innocence under the wing of a chaperone when she ventures abroad, the woman who angles for a rich husband is no better than an adventuress, whatever and whoever she may be. And you let yourself run to seed, and neglect your work, and take to cynical declamation against things in general, when you have good reason to be thankful for a blessed escape from misery. Do you think such a wife as William Crawford's daughter could fail to make you wretched? Why, she would spend your annual earnings on her gloves; and the day that brought you back your unhung pictures from the Academy would in all probability bring you a county-court summons from your wife's milliner. No, no, Phil; the lovely Florence would have been no wife for you, and she has shown herself wise in her generation. You want a dear homely little creature--say an orphan,--there's an extraordinary advantage in marrying an orphan,--a poor desolate young thing who has spent her girlhood as half-boarder, or governess-pupil in a cheap boarding-school, and who will think Islington a paradise, and esteem herself fortunate if she gets a new gown once a year, and a clean bonnet-cap at Christmas and Easter. That's the only kind of wife for a rising man--the dear good uncomplaining helpmate, who will devote all the strength of her intellect to make both ends meet, and will, while sitting by your side in the parlour, have an instinctive consciousness that the maid-of-all-work is burning a tallow-candle to waste in the back-kitchen,--the model housewife of the Dutch painters, who goes down to her kitchen with a candle in the dead of night, to prevent waste and riot. You want a dear little girl with a genius for mending and contriving, who will sit by your fireside darning your socks, and singing 'Wapping old stairs' or 'The last rose of summer' while you work at your easel, and who will believe in you, in spite of the world, as the greatest genius that ever handled a brush. In point of fact, you want such a wife as my wife!" exclaimed Sigismund triumphantly. "And as for Florence Crawford, let her make merry or