Life is a constant carnival to Mrs. Merrysmile, and love is a delightful pastime which is necessary for her entertainment. There is no harm in it; her love-making is, indeed, of the most innocent kind, in fact, it is purely psychological, without a suspicion of passion, which would only seem incongruous to her. To be loved is essential to her; every one who comes in contact with her must give her of his heart’s best affection. She is satisfied with nothing else, and though she and her husband are on terms of mutual affection and perfect confidence, she takes all the love she can get as her absolute right. That she should give any in return never occurs to her; it is sufficient that she scatters her cheeriness broadcast, relieves her friends and relations of all their depressions, keeps them in good spirits, and, if they be dull or ill, bullies them with a view to mending their ways. But she loves, in her own way, as the butterfly loves the flower that it casually kisses in the garden, and surely the flower is all the sweeter for the butterfly’s kiss. I know I feel all the better for having touched hearts with Mrs. Merrysmile, though her way of loving was not my way, and my sentimental devotion was as congruous with her butterfly heart-flutterings as the Nasmyth steam-hammer with the tin-tack. The humour of the situation was always uppermost in her mind though it had to compete for this place with the gratification of her vanity and the pleasure of passing the time cheerfully for us both, and she could not understand that the whole affair did not present itself to me in exactly the same light. As immunity from contradiction of any kind had been hers throughout her life, both as maid and as wife, my frequent failure to fall in with her ideas as to the humour of our flirtation—for to her it was really nothing more, though in her innocent way she pretended to regard it as a real love-affair—it was not to be wondered at that our confidential communings became less constant, until my lover-like attitude developed into that of the elderly friend. You cannot go on loving desperately a woman to whom everything is simply funny, or, at least, suggestion for a jest. And that is one of the drawbacks of a _par excellence_ cheery woman. You want to love the woman rather than her jokes, or even her bright spirits, charming as the faculty for these undoubtedly is. But as a man’s moods vary so does he expect the woman he loves to respond to them. Incessant cheeriness and readiness to see only the quaint or comic side of things, if unchecked in expression, is apt to turn life into a farce, and even the merriest farce jars when one is only in the temper for romantic drama, or when pathos is the dominant note of the moment.