Of course there were some houses where such problems were of more immediate and persistent interest than other houses. Such a house was the ever-dear house of the S. family, which made itself a home any hour of the day up to midnight for such youth as had once been adopted its sons. It was not only a literary house, it was even more a musical house, where there was both singing and playing, with interludes of laughing and joking in all forms of seemly mirth, with the whole family, till the little boys of it stumbled up the stairs half asleep. I could not play, but I was sometimes suffered by that large-hearted hospitality to try singing; and I could talk with the best. So, it was my more than content in the lapses of the music to sit with the young aunt (she seemed so mature in her later twenties to me in my earliest) and exchange impressions of the books new and old that we had been reading. We frequenters of the house held her in that honor which is the best thing in the world for young men to feel for some gentle and cultivated woman; I suppose she was a charming person apart from her literary opinions; but we did not think of her looks; we thought of her wise and just words, her pure and clear mind. It was the high noon of Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade, whose books seemed following one another so rapidly. _The Newcomes_ was passing as a serial through _Harper's Magazine_, and we were reading that with perhaps more pleasure than any of the other novels and with the self-satisfaction in our pleasure which I have before this argued was Thackeray's most insidious effect with youth striving to spurn the world it longed to shine in. We went about trying to think who in the story was like whom in life, and our kind hostess was reading it, too, and trying to think that, too; but it was not well for her to say what she thought in the case of the handsomest, and for several reasons, really, the first among us. It appeared that she thought he was like Clive Newcome and that we others were like those friends of his whom in the tale his nature was shown subordinating. She said something like this to some one, and when her saying came to us others we revolted in a body. No, we would not have that theory of our relation to our friend; and I do not know to what infuriate excess of not calling for a week we carried our resentment. I do not know how after the week, if it was so long, we began calling again; but I surmise it was through something said or done by that dear Miss A. which made it easy for her sister to modify her wounding theory into a recognition of the proud equality which bound us friends together.