All we know is that he served as a pivotal point in the lives of two
great people, and then passed on, unwittingly, into the obscurity from
whence he came.

On this occasion the Right Honorable read an original paper on an
Important Subject. Mrs. Taylor often gave receptions to eminent and
learned personages, because her heart was a-hungered to know and to
become, and she vainly thought that the society of learned people would
satisfy her soul.

She was young. She was also impulsive, vivacious, ambitious. John Stuart
Mill says she was rarely beautiful, but she wasn't. Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder. All things are comparative, and John Stuart Mill
regarded Mrs. Taylor from the first night he saw her as the standard of
feminine perfection. All women scaled down as they varied from her. As
an actual fact, her features were rather plain, mouth and nose large,
cheek-bones in evidence, and one eye was much more open than the other,
and this gave people who did not especially like her, excuse for saying
that her eyes were not mates. As for John Stuart Mill he used, at times,
to refer to the wide-open orb as her "critical eye."

Yet these eyes were lustrous, direct and honest, and tokened the rare
quality of mental concentration. Her head was square and long, and had
corners. She carried the crown of her head high, and her chin in.

We need not dally with old Mr. Taylor here--for us he was only Mrs.
Taylor's husband, a kind of useful marital appendendum. He was a
merchant on 'Change, with interests in argosies that plied to
Tripoli--successful, busy, absorbed, with a twinge of gout, and a habit
of taking naps after dinner with a newspaper over his face. Moreover, he
was an Oxford man, and this was his chief recommendation to the
eighteen-year-old girl, when she married him four years before. But
education to him was now only a reminiscence. He had sloughed the old
Greek spirit as a bird molts its feathers, with this difference: that a
bird molts its feathers because it is growing a better crop, while Mr.
Taylor wasn't growing anything but a lust after "L. s. d."

Once in two years there was an excursion to Oxford to attend a reunion
of a Greek-letter society, and perhaps twice in the winter certain
ancient cronies came, drank musty ale, and smoked long clay pipes, and
sang college songs in cracked falsetto.

Mrs. Taylor was ashamed of them--disappointed. Was this the college
spirit of which she had read so much?