She had been crystallized, so to speak, by some strange process of suffering, into a cold and dull propriety, never infringed on save at times when she found herself alone with me, and when the old frolic-spirit would for a little time possess her.  It was not dead, but sleeping.

“And what, my dear Bertie,” I said, one day, when Mr. Mortimer had departed, and she came to throw herself down on the sofa in my chamber and rest, “what has reconciled you to the old Parrot, as you used to call our sublime Shakespeare?”

“Sublime!  I shall think you affected, Miriam, if you apply that word again to that old commonplace.  If he were sublime, do you suppose all the world would read him or go to see his plays?  Do reserve that epithet for Milton, Dante, Tasso, Schiller, and the like inaccessibilities.  Yes, I do revere ‘Wallenstein’ more than any thing Shakespeare ever spouted”—­in answer to my gently-shaking head—­“I should break down over Thekla, I should, indeed.”

“Do you think his bed was soft under the war-horses?”—­and she waved her hand—­“O God! what a tragedy; what a love!” and she covered her face with her quivering palm.

“Bertie, you are still too excitable.  I am sorry to see it.”

“Philosopher, cure thyself.”

“Yes, I know that was always a fault of mine.”

“That is why you married the man in the iron mask, you know.  I could never have loved that person.”

“Describe the man you think you could have loved, Bertie La Vigne.”

“Could have loved?  That time is past forever, child.  ’Frozen, and dead forever,’ as Shelley says. He was my affinity, I believe, only he died before I was born.  What a pity!  I would rather be his widow than the wife of any man living.”

“She would like to hear that, no doubt, Bertie.”

“Well, she may hear it if she chooses when I go to England to read the old Parrot in the right way, under their very noses, Kembles and all.  I’ll let Mrs. Shelley know I’m there,” and she laughed merrily.

“And what is your idea of the way to read Shakespeare, Bertie dear?” I asked, playfully.

“As one having authority, a head and shoulders above him and all his prating, just as you would talk to your every-day next neighbor, read him without any fear of his old deer-stealing ghost?  Why, Miriam, he knew himself better than we knew him.  He had no more idea of being a genius than you have!  He was a sort of artesian well of a man, and could not help spouting platitudes, that was all.  Besides, he had eyes to see and ears to hear, and a very Yankee spirit of investigation.  It is the fashion to crack him up like the Bible, both encyclopaedias, that’s all!  Every man can see himself in these books, and every man likes a looking-glass, and that’s the whole secret of their success.”

“Bertie, you are incorrigible.”

“No, I am not; only genuine.  I do think there is a good deal in both of the works in question, but their sublimity I dispute.  They are homely, coarse, commonplace, as birth and death.”