If this be a true analysis of a woman’s life—­and who will say it is not?—­the dreams of the Marchioness of Kilcarney would begin in her easy-chair about the second spring after her marriage, the shaggy shape that haunts the back of my mind would hear her dreams, and the wooing that began with the daffodils would continue always, for she is a woman that could keep a lover till the end of time.  At her death husband and lover would visit her grave together and talk of her perfections in the winter evenings.  But if Violet did not die another vagrant male would steal through the ilex-trees, a hunter in pursuit of game, or else it might be a fisher, seated among the rocks waiting, for tunny-fish.  Either might take Violet’s fancy.  The author of Muslin seems to have entertained a thought of some such pastoral frolic in the Shelbourne Hotel—­the opposition of husband and lover to the newcomer, Harding, whom it had occurred to Mrs. Barton to invite to Brookfield, and whom she would have invited had it not been for her great matrimonial projects; my forerunner, who was an artist, saw that any deflection of Mrs. Barton’s thoughts would jeopardize his composition, and he allowed Mrs. Barton to remain a chaperon.  He was right in this, but Violet should have been the impulse and nucleus of a new story. . . .  I began to think suddenly of the blight that would fall on the twain if Violet’s lover were to die, and to figure them sitting in the evenings meditating on the admirable qualities of the deceased till in their loneliness he would come to seem to them as a being more than human, touching almost on the Divine.  Their ears would retain the sound of his voice, and the familiar furniture would provoke remembrances of him.  Ashamed of their weakness, their eyes would seek the chair he used to sit in:  it is away in a far corner, lest a casual visitor should draw it forward and defile it with his presence—­a thing that happened once (the unhappy twain remember how they lacked moral courage to beg him to choose another chair).  The table, laid for two, was too painful to behold, and they never enjoyed a meal, hardly could they eat, till at last it was decided that his place should be laid for him as if he had gone away on a journey, and might appear in the doorway and sit down with them and share the repast as of yore—­a pretty deception the folly of which they were alive to (a little) but would not willingly be without.

His room, too, awaits him, and his clothes have not been destroyed or given to the poor, but he folded by charitable hands in the drawers kept safe from moth with orris-root and lavender.  His hat hangs on its accustomed peg in the hall, and they think of it among many other things.  At last the silence of these lonely meditations is broken by sudden recollections—­for dinner the cook had sent up a boiled chicken instead of roast, and he had looked upon boiled chicken as a vulgar insularism always.  Nor were there bananas