Then her casual way of housekeeping occurs to them both as humorous, and perhaps while they are still at dinner the printer’s proof of some serial story she is writing for a newspaper will arrive, and the rest of the meal will have to take care of itself. Surely her husband can help himself to the pudding; besides some day his amiability and devotion will furnish her with “copy,” and how can she, when she comes to draw him as a character, describe his qualities with her customary graphic power unless she tests them under all circumstances? And her husband falling in with her literary humour, accepts all these things with equanimity. For he knows her, not only in her moods of literary enthusiasm or “shoppiness,” or when she is playing with paradoxes and making sensational statements merely for bravado. He knows her when she is wooed to gentler moods by the soft persuasive influence of the twilight, when the evening star “washes the dusk with silver,” and the realities of life lose themselves in the mystic poetry of the hour, and every feeling sings in tune the divine melody of love, when the realistic lady-novelist, as well as the woman of humble toil, mutely realises that it is a good thing to be loved by a good husband and sweet children. He knows her then, and both are content for always. _THE DISAPPOINTED SPINSTER_ Though I have always disputed the truth of the proverb that “the tailor makes the man”—since the more fashionably I am dressed the less I feel of my individual manhood—I am perfectly sure that the lover, not the dressmaker, makes the woman. As he pulls the strings of her heart, so can he shape her life, and according as he makes her love react upon herself with joy or sorrow, so can he develop the tendencies of her temperament, and, through all circumstances, bring out the sweet or the sour in her nature. Disappointment in love will embitter the cynical-minded woman as no mere loss of fortune could, and make her constantly aggressive in her attitude towards both her own and the opposite sex; whereas, to the woman of gentle faith, it will simply lend the crown of patient sisterhood with all men and all women, nor will it in the least destroy her faith in the beautiful beneficence of the natural order of marriage. If you hear a spinster who has passed her thirtieth year inveighing in set and bitter terms against the joys and advantages of the married state, be sure she has had her matrimonial opportunity and missed it, while she gave the love of her girlhood to a “detrimental.” “Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken; Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken.”