take the point of view of science, be the stage carpenters, and let the actors move on and off.  By this, we shall learn to take a certain pride in the machinery.  To become stage carpenter, is to attain to the highest rank within the reach of intellectual man.  But your own machinery must be sound, or you can’t look after that of the theatre.  Don’t over-tax thy stomach, O youth!

“And now, farewell, my worthy ass!  You have been thinking me one through a fair half of this my letter, so I hasten to be in advance of you, by calling you one.  You are one:  I likewise am one.  We are all one.  The universal language is hee-haw, done in a grievous yawn.

“Yours,

“Edward B.

“P.S.—­Don’t fail to send a letter by the next post; then, go and see her; write again exactly what she says, and let me know the man’s name.  You will not lose a minute.  Also, don’t waste ink in putting Mrs. Lovell’s name to paper:  I desire not to hear anything of the woman.”

Algernon read this letter in a profound mystification, marvelling how it could possibly be that Edward and Mrs. Lovell had quarrelled once more, and without meeting.

They had parted, he knew or supposed that he knew, under an engagement to arrange the preliminaries of an alliance, when Edward should return from France; in other words, when Edward had thrown grave-dust on a naughty portion of his past; severing an unwise connection.  Such had certainly been Edward’s view of the matter.  But Mrs. Lovell had never spoken to Algernon on that subject.  She had spoken willingly and in deep sympathy of Dahlia.  She had visited her, pitied her, comforted her; and Algernon remembered that she had looked very keen and pinched about the mouth in alluding to Dahlia; but how she and Edward had managed to arrive at another misunderstanding was a prodigious puzzle to him; and why, if their engagement had snapped, each consented to let Dahlia’s marriage (which was evidently distasteful to both) go on to the conclusion of the ceremony, he could not comprehend.  There were, however, so many things in the world that he could not comprehend, and he had grown so accustomed, after an effort to master a difficulty, to lean his head back upon downy ignorance, that he treated this significant letter of Edward’s like a tough lesson, and quietly put it by, together with every recommendation it contained.  For all that was practical in it, it might just as well not have been written.

The value of the letter lies in the exhibition it presents of a rather mark-worthy young man, who has passed through the hands of a—­(what I must call her; and in doing so, I ask pardon of all the Jack Cades of Letters, who, in the absence of a grammatical king and a government, sit as lords upon the English tongue) a crucible woman.  She may be inexcusable herself; but you for you to be base, for you to be cowardly, even to betray a weakness, though it be on her behalf,—­though you can plead that all you have done is for her, yea, was partly instigated by her,—­it will cause her to dismiss you with the inexorable contempt of Nature, when she has tried one of her creatures and found him wanting.