My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the higher cookery. After the confession of the boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming with a certain dismay in those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they softened again very quickly, and then Jane's must have met them. "Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of all that _might_ have been! Oh, ma'am, I _could_ have been so happy! I ought to have known, but I didn't know.... You're very kind to let me talk to you, ma'am ... for it's hard on me, ma'am ... it's har-r-r-r-d"-- And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out some of the fulness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My Euphemia, thank Heaven, has never properly grasped the importance of "keeping up her position." And since that fit of weeping, much of the accent of bitterness has gone out of Jane's scrubbing and brush work. Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy--but that scarcely belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time and change are at work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not believe very much in the existence of sorrows that never heal. IN THE MODERN VEIN AN UNSYMPATHETIC LOVE STORY Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has published on three several occasions volumes of delicate verses,--some, indeed, border on indelicacy,--and his column "Of Things Literary" in the _Climax_ is well known. His Byronic visage and an interview have appeared in the _Perfect Lady_. It was Aubrey Vair, I believe, who demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse than his sentiment, and who detected "a subtle bourgeois flavour" in Shakespeare. However, it is not generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic experiences as well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some little time since as his literary prototype, and that may have had something to do with his temporary lapse from sexual integrity. For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men, giving us landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even cliff of their respectable life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly above drink, this instability called genius, or, more fully, the consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair possessed. Since Shelley set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that his duty to himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and courage warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At anyrate, a minor genius without his affections twisted into an inextricable muddle, and who did not occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I have never met.