BREAKFAST WITH OUR GUEST. Mrs. Dennison was late the next morning. Indeed, she generally was late. It was sure to produce a little excitement when she entered, if the family were grouped in expectation, and her system of elegant selfishness rendered any consideration of the convenience of others a matter of slight importance. She was always lavish in apologies, those outgrowths of insincerity; and, in fact, managed to weave a sort of a fascination out of her own faults. This certainly was the case here. If Mr. Lee was resolute about anything in his household, it was that punctuality at meals should be observed: indeed, I have seldom seen him out of humor on any other subject. But this morning he had been moving about in the upper hall a full hour, glancing impatiently at the papers which always reached us before breakfast, and walking up and down with manifest annoyance. Yet the moment that woman appeared with her coquettish little breakfast-cap just hovering on the back of her head, and robed in one of the freshest and most graceful morning dresses you ever saw, his face cleared up. With a smile that no one could witness without a throb of the heart, he received her apologies and compliments all mingled together on her lips like honey in the heart of a flower, as if they had been favors of which we were all quite undeserving. We went down to breakfast at last; but just as we were sitting down, our guest took a fancy to run out on the terrace and gather a handful of heliotrope which she laid by her plate, exhaling the odor sensuously between the pauses of the meal. I don't know what the rest thought of all this, but I was disgusted. It is a strong word, I know, but I have no other for the repulsion that seizes upon me even now when I think of that woman. Her very passion for flowers, to me almost a heavenly taste in itself, was so combined with materialism, that the perfume of the heliotrope sickened me. Jessie did not seem to sympathize in these feelings, nor care that her own choice flower-plot had been rifled of its sweetest blossoms. In fact, the fascination of that woman's manner seemed more powerful with her than it had proved with the proud, strong man who sat opposite me.