Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of these ways she was not always quite infallible. _On a les défauts de ses qualités_; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very noble quality indeed! Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of her married life, she soon became "_joliment dégourdie_," as Barty called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was she always with just the right thing to say--or to withhold, if silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the world as a great man's wife--and a good and beautiful woman--was always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for self-assertion on her part whatever--without assumption of any kind. It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of the "Universal Fur Company, Limited." [Illustration: "SARDONYX"] How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no sinecure! but she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women of her time. With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon with, and incapable of the slightest flattery, even to Barty, who was so fond of it from her, and in spite of her unbounded admiration for him. Such was your mother, my dear Roberta, in the bloom of her early twenties and ever after; till her death, in fact--on the day following his! * * * * * Somewhere about the spring of 1863 she said to me: