“Alice,” said Uncle John, his face losing its half-mocking smile with which he had been watching her eager countenance, “Alice, did you know that I had been married?”

We started.  “Married?  No.  How was it, and when?”

“It is no matter now, my girls.  Some time I may tell you about it.  I should not have spoken of it now, but that I know my little Alice would not believe a word I am going to tell her, if she thought she was listening to an old bachelor’s croakings.  Now I can speak with authority.  You think you could not live without Herbert’s love?  My dear, we can live without a great many things that we fancy indispensable.  Nor is it so very easy to die.  There comes many a time in life when it would seem quite according to the fitness of things, just the proper ending to the romance, to lie down and die; but, unfortunately, or rather fortunately, dying is a thing that we cannot do so just in the nick of time; and indeed”—­and Uncle John’s face assumed its strange smile, which seemed to take you, as it were, suddenly behind the scenes, to show you the wrong side of the tapestry,—­“and indeed,” he continued, “when I look back on the times in my life that I should have died, when it was fitting and proper to die, when I felt that dying would be such a trump card to play, if only I could manage it, I must say that I am glad now that it was beyond my power to arrange things according to the melodramatic rules.  As it is, I am alive now.  I shake my fist at all the ghosts of my departed tragedies and say, ’I am worth two of you.  I am alive.  I have all the chances of the future in my favor.’”

Here he caught sight of Alice’s wide-opened eyes, and his smile changed into his own genial laugh, as he kissed her forehead and went on.

“That was a little aside, Alice, made to my other self, my metaphysical man,—­not meant at all for my audience.  I was meditating a lecture on the causes of conjugal happiness, but I seem to have stumbled upon a knot in the very first unwinding of the thread of my discourse.”

“I’ll listen to the lecture, Uncle, though I see but one simple and all-sufficient cause for my happiness.”

“That Herbert loves you, ha?  Know, my pretty neophyte, that happiness, married happiness especially, does not come from being loved, but from loving.  What says our Coleridge?

  “’For still the source, not fountain, gives
  The daily food on which Love lives.’

“And he is right, although you shake your curls.  In most marriages, in all that are not matters of convenience, one party has a stronger heart, will, character, than the other.  And that one loves the most from the very necessity of his nature, and, loving most, is the happier.  The other falls, after a while, into a passive state, becomes the mere recipient of love, and finds his or her happiness in something else, or perhaps does not find it at all.”

“Neither side would satisfy me, Uncle John; I hardly know which fate would be the more terrible.  Do you think I would accept such a compromise in exchange for all I am living and feeling now?  I would rather be miserable at once than so half-happy.”