friends, alas! do not return umbrellas.  Your poet writes in white kid gloves, and thinks in them too.  Imagine the magnificent rush and struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity of life, and then read your Tennyson’s milk-and-water tales, with their modern English-menage feelings.  Arthur would have been much more likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the Nibelungen Lied, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the Guinevere of that time more good.”

“And what is your Alfred, Anita?”

“He is divine.”

“After the heathen pattern.  He dipped his pen in mire.”

“What is mire?—­water and earth.  What are we?—­water and earth.  Mire is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree, but the germ of the flower.  A poet who is too delicate to plant his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a parasite:  it can have no separate existence of its own.”

“But one need not be bad to be great.”

“Nor need one be good to be great,” returned Anita sarcastically.  “Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a peculiar time.  He did not imagine:  he felt, he lived, he was himself, and was original, like a new variety of flower or a new species of insect.  Tennyson has gleaned from everybody’s fields:  our Alfred gathered only from his own.  The one is made, the other is born.”

“Come away,” said Afra impatiently:  “no one can speak while Anita is on her hobby.  Besides, I must get home early to trim a bonnet for to-morrow;” and without more leavetaking than a “Good-evening,” which included every one, we found ourselves in the street.

“Who is Anita?” I asked.

“She is nobody just now:  what she will be remains to be seen.  Her family wish her to be an artist:  she wishes to adopt the stage as a profession, and is studying for it sub rosa.  Did you ever see a more tragic face?”

“Poor thing!” I involuntarily exclaimed.

“Don’t pity her,” said Afra, more seriously than she had yet spoken.  “The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a strong natural inclination for any particular life and the opportunity of following it.  The man or woman who has that can use the wheel of Fate for a spinning-wheel.”

The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the station.  “How do I look?” she asked, standing up for my inspection as soon as I appeared in sight, at the same time regarding as much of her dress as it was possible for her to see.  But before I could reply the satisfied expression of her face changed:  an unpleasant discovery had been made.  “I have shoes on that are not mates,” she exclaimed—­“cloth and leather:  that looks rather queer, doesn’t it?  Do you think it will be noticed?  I could not decide which pair to wear, and put on one of each to see the effect:  afterward I forgot them.  Now, I suppose that would be thought eccentric, though any one might make the same mistake.  It shows I have two pairs of shoes,” she added more cheerfully, “and they are both black.  How is my bonnet?”