But all this is not love.  It may exist, to be sure, where there is love; it generally does.  But it may also exist where there is no love.  Love, my dear ladies, is self-sacrifice; it is a life out of self and in another.  Its very essence is the preferring of the comfort, the ease, the wishes of another to one’s own, for the love we bear them.  Love is giving, and not receiving.  Love is not a sheet of blotting-paper or a sponge, sucking in every thing to itself; it is an out-springing fountain, giving from itself.  Love’s motto has been dropped in this world as a chance gem of great price by the loveliest, the fairest, the purest, the strongest of Lovers that ever trod this mortal earth, of whom it is recorded that He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”  Now, in love, there are ten receivers to one giver.  There are ten persons in this world who like to be loved and love love, where there is one who knows how to love.  That, O my dear ladies, is a nobler attainment than all your French and music and dancing.  You may lose the very power of it by smothering it under a load of early self-indulgence.  By living just as you are all wanting to live,—­living to be petted, to be flattered, to be admired, to be praised, to have your own way, and to do only that which is easy and agreeable,—­you may lose the power of self-denial and self-sacrifice; you may lose the power of loving nobly and worthily, and become a mere sheet of blotting-paper all your life.

You will please to observe that, in all the married life of these two, as thus far told, all the accommodations, compliances, changes, have been made by John for Lillie.

He has been, step by step, giving up to her his ideal of life, and trying, as far as so different a nature can, to accommodate his to hers; and she accepts all this as her right and due.

She sees no particular cause of gratitude in it,—­it is what she expected when she married.  Her own specialty, the thing which she has always cultivated, is to get that sort of power over man, by which she can carry her own points and purposes, and make him flexible to her will; nor does a suspicion of the utter worthlessness and selfishness of such a life ever darken the horizon of her thoughts.

John’s bills were graver than he expected.  It is true he was rich; but riches is a relative term.  As related to the style of living hitherto practised in his establishment, John’s income was princely, and left a large balance to be devoted to works of general benevolence; but he perceived that, in this year, that balance would be all absorbed; and this troubled him.

Then, again, his establishment being now given up by his sister must be reorganized, with Lillie at its head; and Lillie declared in the outset that she could not, and would not, take any trouble about any thing.

“John would have to get servants; and the servants would have to see to things:”  she “was resolved, for one thing, that she wasn’t going to be a slave to house-keeping.”