As for him, he went home in a beautiful dream, and in the morning he wrote a song about her eyes which was so good that he sent it to the _Athenaeum_, and got two guineas for it--so that his holiday was really not altogether wasted. THE FORCE OF HABIT FROM her very earliest teens every man she met had fallen at her feet. Her father in paternal transports--dignified and symbolic as the adoration of the Magi, uncles in forced unwilling tribute, cousins according to their kind, even brothers, resentful of their chains yet still enslaved, lovers by the score, persons disposed to marriage by the half-dozen. And she had smiled on them all, because it was so nice to be loved, and if one could make those who loved happy by smiling, why, smiles were cheap! Not cheap like inferior soap, but like the roses from a full June garden. To one she gave something more than smiles--herself to wit--and behold her at twenty, married to the one among her slaves to whom she had deigned to throw the handkerchief--real Brussels, be sure! Behold her happy in the adoration of the one, the only one among her adorers whom she herself could adore. His name was John, of course, and it was a foregone conclusion that he should be a stock-broker. All the same, he was nice, which is something: and she loved him, which is everything. The little new red-brick Queen Anne villa was as the Garden of Eden to the man and the woman--but the jerry builder is a reptile more cursed than the graceful serpent who, in his handsome suit of green and gold, pulled out the lynch-pin from the wedding chariot of our first parents. The new house--"Cloudesley" its name was--was damp as any cloud, and the Paradise was shattered, not by any romantic serpent-and-apple business, but by plain, honest, every-day rheumatism. It was, indeed, as near rheumatic fever as one may go without tumbling over the grisly fence. The doctor said "Buxton." John could not leave town. There was a boom or a slump or something that required his personal supervision. So her old nurse was called up from out of the mists of the grey past before he and she were hers and his, and she went to Buxton in a specially reserved invalid carriage. She went, with half her dainty trousseau clothes--a helpless invalid.