..

'One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you, I don't like your people. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else, and it's never respectable. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to his Jill: We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and they do. I say it's indecent.

"But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jili, and if Jill's in bad form without Jack, one must ask them together. I want people to like me, and to enjoy themselves."

Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all's blue with somebody you'd hate if you'd married her.

"What does that matter, so long as they're amused?"

What an immoral woman you are, Dolly! To hear you'

"I only mean that I don't think it matters; you know it doesn't matter; everybody's always doing it.'

"If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands; some of the men's wives-"

"I couldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my house!

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"Just as I say you're so immoral.” 'No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me except you.'

Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can't keep within your pin money—

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Pin money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it last year-eight hundred guineas each."

"You ought to buy clothes." "Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all goes in little things, and all my own money, too: wedding presents, christening pres

ents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all nonsense your grumbling about my bills to Worth, and Elise, and Virot; Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had tortoiseshell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had jewelled collars, and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime, and we'd invented it!"

Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless sentence. "Naso magister eris," he remarks, "might certainly be inscribed over the chamberdoors of all your friends.'

"I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people.'

"I'll tell you what I do mean-that I don't like the house made a joke of in London; I'll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a scandal's begun in town in the season it always comes down here to carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn't be you always ask them down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest women didn't do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o'-loves under the porticoes."

"I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honest woman. One would think you were speaking to the house-maids. I wish you'd go and stay in somebody else's house; you always spoil things here.'

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Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there, three days t'other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and to say, 'thanks,' if your host gives you a few brace to take away with you-not for me if I know it, while there's a bird in the covers at my own places.

"I thought you were always bored at home?"

Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind having the house full either, only I want you to get decenter people in it. Why, look at your list-they're all paired like animals in the ark. Here's Lady Arthur for Hugo Mountjoy, here's Iona and Madame de Caillac, here's Mrs.

Curzon for Lawrence, here's Dick Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke and Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and Olive Dawlish. I say it's absolutely indecent when you know how all these people are talked about.

If one waited for somebody not talked about one would have an empty house or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven't you ever seen that advertisement about matches which only light on their own boxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matches without the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won't get anything out of either.

"Ovid was born too early; he never knew this admirable illustration!"

"There's only one thing worse than inviting people without the people they care about; it is to invite them with the people they're tired of; I did that once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and Gervase together, and then found that they had broken with each other two months before. That is the sort of blunder I do hate to make."

"Well, nothing happened?"

Of course, nothing happened. Nobody ever shows anything. But it looks so stupid in me; one is always expected to know-"

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What an increase to the responsibilities of a hostess! She must know all the ins and outs of her acquaintances' unlawful affections as a Prussian officer knows the French by-roads. How simple an affair it used to be when the Victorian reign was young, and Lord and Lady So and So and Mr. and Mrs. Nobody all came to stay for a week in twos and twos as inevitably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs.'

You pretend to regret those days, but you know you'd be horribly bored if you had always to go out with me.

"Politeness would require me to deny, but truthfulness would compel me to assent.'

"Of course, it would. You don't want anybody with you who has heard all your best stories a thousand times, and knows what your doctor has told you not to eat; I don't want anybody who has seen how I look when I'm ill, and knows where my false hair is put on. It's quite natural. By the way, Boom says Ovid's ladies had perukes, too, as one of them put her wig on upside down before him, aad it chilled

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'My dear George, I wish you would mind your own business, to use a very vulgar expression. Do I ever say anything when you talk nonsense in the Lords and when you give your political picnics and shout yourself hoarse to the farmers who go away and vote against your man? Do I ever say anything when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign a head for their corn and stalk stags which cost you eighty pounds each for their keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand a year for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when you think that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will be either grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off their rents? You know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to ruin yourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seem best to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house parties and choose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What, are you going away? How exactly like a man to go away when he gets the worst of the argument.

Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is a gentleman; he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he will always stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in the room a moment longer he will swear that allusion to the Scotch stags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. When Achnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with what stags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and there had always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had never cared as much as some men for deer-stalking, but still, as Achnalorrie is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and the ugly house on the stony straith-side, and the blinding rains and the driving snows and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross as best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole things worth living for; and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit him with the cost of each stag!

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Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks about the gardens. "If they think they can make a point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it may.'

He strolls down between two high yewwalls with his hands in his pockets and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine estates, fair rents, handsome children and a life of continual change, and yet he is bored and doesn't like anything, and this peaceful, green garden with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful solitudes says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault of his world? He doesn't know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver. His father was always contented and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in his father's time there was no grouse disease, no row about rents, no wire-fencing to lame your horses, no ground game bill to corrupt your farmers, no leaseholder's bill hanging over your London houses, no corn imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor Boom's turn comes how will things be? Joe Chamberlain president, perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment grounds.

He possesses two other very big places

in adjacent counties, Orme Castle and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious, ugly; he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little cosy house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has never fallen.

He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of the house; it is his break and his omnibus going down the avenue on their way to the nearest railway station, four miles off, to meet some of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be nothing seen of them till two o'clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them. Why can't Dulcia Waverly come before the twentieth? Lady Waverly always amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with, only when one's own people do so it makes one almost more angry than when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverly agrees with him it leaves him with a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia Waverly always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if he had chosen; as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts is agreeable.

He sits down in one of the clipped yewtree arbors to light a new cigar and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him drawing its beautiful train over the smoothshaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose bough. The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant in the morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot, and what fools they were who clipped a yewtree into the shape of a periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout stream makes. Why don't they turn it and send it further from the house? He's got no money to do anything, or he would have it done to

morrow.

A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be melodious or soothing at any time.

"Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says, savagely, to a gardener's boy who is gathering up fallen rose leaves.

The boy gapes and touches his hair,

his hat being already on the ground, in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden, or visit them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the neighborhood and the work-people as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.

"How long will they touch their caps or pull their fore-locks to us?" thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'sir' to him."

This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind-the coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation; why wasn't he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's nominee as a matter of course without question?

"Well, and what good men they got in those days," he thinks. "Fox, and Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of 'em; fine orators, clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; buncombe and bad logic and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in those days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up himself, I dare say there'll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the Radical caucus or the English Land League, who'll make the poor devils believe that the millennium's coming in with them and leave Boom nowhere!

The prospect was so shocking that he throws his cigar end at the peacocks and gets up out of the evergreen periwig.Chapter I. in A House Party.

SOME SURMISES OF A FASHIONABLE LADY AS TO HEAVEN.

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists, pétroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that

higher region where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout, in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an affaire des moeurs, like decency, still the subtle philosophies and sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set them flying, had affected her slightly. She was a true believer, just as she was well-dressed woman, and had her creed just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course.

a

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There was another world, and saints and angels and eternity; yes, of course-but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madam Mila and Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue and hell for crime, but what in the name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil speaks of, suspensæ ad ventos, to purify themselves, as the sails of a ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters forever and forever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive Modern Society in the spheres?-In A Winter City.

SEPARATION.

OUIDA.

[Farina was born at Sorso, a small place in Sardinia. When he was thirteen, his father left the island to fill a legal post at Casale Monferrato. When the young Farina had ended his school studies he went to

Paris and Turin to study law, and in 1868 took his de

gree. Immediately after he married. Strongly attracted to literature, he forthwith abandoned all idea

of a legal career, and settled at Milan, as the intellectual centre of Northern Italy. Soon after he issued his first

Milan, where he edits a musical and literary newspaper with taste and discrimination. His works have found great favor among his German neighbors, by whom they are translated as soon as they appear. Dutch and

French versions also exist. Farina has thus already

acquired a European fame. The little genre picture of

Italian life which we translate has been pronounced by no less an authority than Signor de Gubernatis as one of Farina's most characteristic productions. It is cer

tainly one of those that best lends itself for transformiation into another mode of thought and speech.]

I.

My room in the Via Bagutta was really situated a little higher than was necessary. I said so to myself once a day, I had so often to climb the one hundred and twelve stairs that separated me from the world below; but whenever I reached the top, and gazed through the window over the splendid panorama of roofs and chimneys, I so much enjoyed the view that I remained living there. Four months later I had made the acquaintance of all my neighbors; among others I made the acquaintance of the most eccentric married couple that can be imagined. If I were to say the Signor Sulpicio and Signora Concetta were each the actual half corresponding to the other, the statement need hardly be metaphorically taken; for, in truth, both of them together owned only as much flesh and muscle as usually belong to one ordinary mortal. If their years were added together, their sum was considerably over that of a century and a half. And if I imagined to myself-a funny, but not improper notion-Signora Concetta standing on her husband's head, it seemed to me as if the worthy lady would just touch, or, perhaps, even project, a very little beyond the ceiling; and my room was only three and a half metres high.

so like one another, that they might easily have been taken for brother and sister. But those noses, those noses! They had shape; and I must confess that never in obstinately retained their own original my life did I see two more differently shaped noses.

The man's was hooked

eagle-fashion-as though inquisitively to watch whatever entered the mouth; while the woman's was small and retreating, as though it stepped aside to leave the way to her mouth open for a good morsel. This simile was not made by me in the first instance, but had its origin with the couple.

It happened at dinner fifty-four years and eleven months ago, in an unfortunate moment of mutual anger about some sauce that tasted of smoke.

This was the first cloud that appeared on the fair sky of their conjugal happiness; but it was an ugly, dark cloud, and it mounted from the sauce into their noses, from their noses into their heads, from their heads into their minds. At last they discovered that never on this earth had a married pair more unwillingly borne the burden of the conjugal yoke than they. Concetta spoke of returning to her relatives, and Sulpicio wished her to go at once; but considering that they were on their wedding journey, and that Concetta's relatives lived two hundred miles away from the scene of this first matrimonial quarrel, the execution of this plan was, for the time being, deferred.

But "separation" was, and remained, the password between them. Next day it occurred to Sulpicio that his companion had been intrusted to him as a maiden treasure; he remembered a touching conversation which he had had with his father-in-law; he bethought him of his vow to make her happy;" a whole host of good thoughts and wise resolves rose up in his soul, and at length brought him to the conviction that it was his place to persuade Concetta not to forsake the domestic hearth.

For fifty-five years they had shared bed and board and all the vicissitudes of life with one another; they had so grown into