their aunt, might know them, but was as liable to be sent to sleep by a fellow with a bag of jokes as a watchdog to be quieted by a bone.  The allusion here was to Mrs. Lupin’s painful, partially inexcusable, incurable sense of humour, especially when a gleam of it led to the prohibited passages of life.  The poor lady was afflicted so keenly that, in instances where one of her sex and position in the social scale is bound to perish rather than let even the shadow of a laugh appear, or any sign of fleshly perception or sympathy peep out, she was seen to be mutely, shockingly, penitentially convulsed:  a degrading sight.  And albeit repeatedly remonstrated with, she, upon such occasions, invariably turned imploring glances—­a sort of frowning entreaty—­to the ladies, or to any of her sex present.  “Did you not see that?  Oh! can you resist it?” she seemed to gasp, as she made those fruitless efforts to drag them to her conscious level.  “Sink thou, if thou wilt,” was the phrase indicated to her.  She had once thought her propensity innocent enough, and enjoyable.  Her nieces had almost cured her, by sitting on her, until Mrs. Chump came to make her worst than ever.  It is to be feared that Mrs. Chump was beginning to abuse her power over the little colourless lady.  We cannot, when we find ourselves possessed of the gift of sending a creature into convulsions, avoid exercising it.  Mrs. Lupin was one of the victims of the modern feminine ‘ideal.’  She was in mind merely a woman; devout and charitable, as her nieces admitted; but radically—­what?  They did not like to think, or to say, what;—­repugnant, seemed to be the word.  A woman who consented to perceive the double-meaning, who acknowledged its suggestions of a violation of decency laughable, and who could not restrain laughter, was, in their judgement, righteously a victim.  After signal efforts to lift her up, the verdict was that their Aunt Lupin did no credit to her sex.  If we conceive a timorous little body of finely-strung nerves, inclined to be gay, and shrewdly apprehensive, but depending for her opinion of herself upon those about her, we shall see that Mrs. Lupin’s life was one of sorrow and scourges in the atmosphere of the ‘ideal.’  Never did nun of the cloister fight such a fight with the flesh, as this poor little woman, that she might not give offence to the Tribunal of the Nice Feelings which leads us to ask, “Is sentimentalism in our modern days taking the place of monasticism to mortify our poor humanity?” The sufferings of the Three of Brookfield under Mrs. Chump was not comparable to Mrs. Lupin’s.  The good little woman’s soul withered at the self-contempt to which her nieces helped her daily.  Laughter, far from expanding her heart and invigorating her frame, was a thing that she felt herself to be nourishing as a traitor in her bosom:  and the worst was, that it came upon her like a reckless intoxication at times, possessing her as a devil might; and justifying itself, too, and daring to say, “Am I not Nature?” Mrs. Lupin shrank from the remembrance of those moments.