For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded.  If he had told me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental impossibility it should have gone in any other, and have said it times enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, “Well, I suppose it did.”  But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is thoroughly unmanageable.  Then the baggage-master, in anguish of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,—­

“Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away?  Is this?  Is this?”

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a very suspicious manner, and protest they won’t be got into a scrape.  But Crene has no scrape for them.  She cannot swear to their identity.  She had eyes only for the trunk.

“Well,” says Baggager, at his wits’ end, “you let me take your check, and I’ll send the trunk on by express, when it comes.”

I pity him, and relax my clutch.

“No,” whispers Crene; “as long as you have your check, you as good as have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing.  Keep that till you see your trunk.”

My clutch re-tightens.

“At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn’t come back.  You’ll get to your journey’s end just as soon.”

“Shall I?  Well, I will,” compliant as usual.

“No,” interposes my good genius again.  “Men are always saying that a woman never goes when she engages to go.  She is always a train later or a train earlier, and you can’t meet her.”

Pliant to the last touch I say aloud,—­

“No, I must go in this train”; and so I go trunkless and crest-fallen to meet Halicarnassus.

It is a dismal day, and Crene, to comfort me, puts into my hands two books as companions by the way.  They are Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House,” “The Espousals and the Betrothal.”  I do not approve of reading in the cars; but without is a dense, white, unvarying fog, and within my heart it is not clear sunshine.  So I turn to my books.

Did any one ever read them before?  Somebody wrote a vile review of them once, and gave the idea of a very puerile, ridiculous, apron-stringy attempt at poetry.  Whoever wrote that notice ought to be shot, for the books are charming pure and homely and householdy, yet not effeminate.  Critics may sneer as much as they choose:  it is such love as Vaughan’s that Honorias value.  Because a woman’s nature is not proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims