not do without her.  He imagined what his home would have been with other women whom he knew, and he confessed that with them he would have been less contented.  He acknowledged that he had been guilty of a kind of criminal epicurism; that he rejected in foolish, fatal, nay, even wicked indifference, the bread of life upon which he might have lived and thriven.  His whole effort now was to suppress himself in his wife.  He read to her, a thing he never did before, and when she misunderstood, he patiently explained; he took her into his counsels and asked her opinion; he abandoned his own opinion for hers, and in the presence of her children he always deferred to her, and delighted to acknowledge that she knew more than he did, that she was right and he was wrong.  She was now confined to her house, and the end was near, but this was the most blessed time of her married life.  She grew under the soft rain of his loving care, and opened out, not, indeed, into an oriental flower, rich in profound mystery of scent and colour, but into a blossom of the chalk-down.  Altogether concealed and closed she would have remained if it had not been for this beneficent and heavenly gift poured upon her.  He had just time enough to see what she really was, and then she died.  There are some natures that cannot unfold under pressure or in the presence of unregarding power.  Hers was one.  They require a clear space round them, the removal of everything which may overmaster them, and constant delicate attention.  They require too a recognition of the fact, which M’Kay for a long time did not recognise, that it is folly to force them and to demand of them that they shall be what they cannot be.  I stood by the grave this morning of my poor, pale, clinging little friend now for some years at peace, and I thought that the tragedy of Promethean torture or Christ-like crucifixion may indeed be tremendous, but there is a tragedy too in the existence of a soul like hers, conscious of its feebleness and ever striving to overpass it, ever aware that it is an obstacle to the return of the affection of the man whom she loves.

Meals, as I have said, were disagreeable at M’Kay’s, and when we wanted to talk we went out of doors.  The evening after our visit to the debating hall we moved towards Portland Place, and walked up and down there for an hour or more.  M’Kay had a passionate desire to reform the world.  The spectacle of the misery of London, and of the distracted swaying hither and thither of the multitudes who inhabit it, tormented him incessantly.  He always chafed at it, and he never seemed sure that he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest pleasures so long as London was before him.  What a farce, he would cry, is all this poetry, philosophy, art, and culture, when millions of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of the city!  Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite,