limbs and features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.  If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is “all horse”; and I have often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of its handle.

All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that wore the red jewel.

—­If it were a possible thing,—­women are such strange creatures!  Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?  Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man—­such as he is—­out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

—­A child,—­yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.  The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.

But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I suppose.  They say that leads to love.

—­I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.