, jealousy, cruelty; pity, charity, humility, courage: these emotions are partial and unequal in their incidence. They visit some, and others they pass by. But man that is born of woman cannot escape love. Of whatsoever age thou art, reader, never believe thyself secure from his fiery dart.’‘Now here,’ exclaimed Miss Johnstone, slamming the book face-downwards on the wicker-work table at her side, ‘here, among much vapid rhetoric and dreary rubbish is one huge, dangerous, vital, misleading falsehood.’This outburst having caused more than one lorgnette to be directed upon her, Miss Johnstone ceased to testify openly and continued her reflections to herself. But never had her whole consciousness, her whole being, shown itself, to her, so vociferously articulate. From her toes to her hair she was an incarnation of denial. ‘It is a lie,’ she thought, ‘a cruel, useless lie. If I—since the writer, after many meaningless generalizations, now impudently addresses himself to me—if I had been capable of this passion, would not Stephen Seleucis and Michael B. Sprott and Theodore Drakenburg and Walt Watt have awakened it? They awakened it in everyone else, even in Mamma.’ She looked round: but her mother had not yet appeared.‘The pinnacle of eligibility on which I sat, and to which in a month I must return, was, and no doubt again will be, festooned with offers of marriage. They affected me no more than an invitation to dinner, except that I was harassed by having to take some of them seriously. I am absolutely immune from love. If I marry, it will be from considerations of convenience.‘Alas that one cannot reply to an author except by making notes in the margin, notes he will never see! And this love-adept has wisely left his margi
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