“I shall write a sonnet to it.”

“You may if you choose, provided you don’t publish it.”

“You may trust me for that.  I am not one of those who anatomise their own married happiness for the edification of the whole public, and make fame, if not money, out of their own wives’ hearts.”

“How I should hate you, if you did!  Not that I believe their fine stories about themselves.  At least, I am certain it’s only half the story.  They have their quarrels, my dear, just as you and I have but they take care not to put them into poetry.”

“Well, but who could?  Whether they have a right or not to publish the poetical side of their married life, it is too much to ask them to give you the unpoetical also.”

“Then they are all humbugs, and I believe, if they really love their wives so very much, they would not be at all that pains to persuade the world of it.”

“You are very satirical and spiteful, ma’am.”

“I always am when I am pleased.  If I am particularly happy, I always long to pinch somebody.  I suppose it’s Irish—­

  “‘Comes out, meets a friend, and for love knocks him down.’”

“But you know, you rogue, that you care to read no poetry but love poetry.”

“Of course not every woman does, but let me find you publishing any such about me, and see what I will do to you!  There, now I must go to my work, and you go and write something extra superfinely grand, because I have been so good to you.  No.  Let me go; what a bother you are.  Good-bye.”

And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had been for a week past.

His happiness, truly, was only on the surface.  The old wound had been salved—­as what wound cannot be?—­by woman’s love and woman’s wit but it was not healed.  The cause of his wrong doing, the vain, self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the punishment of it.

Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, “Ah, if he had been as we are!”

Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy.  One cannot heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one really ought to have for Elsley.  How much value is to be attached to his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question; but there was in him more than mere talent:  there was, in thought at least, virtue and magnanimity.