tell us about. I don't regard the last few hours as altogether wasted.

After this the Princess and I did not talk much: there seemed to be no
need of it. But she was a new and revised edition of the old Clarice,
wonderfully sweet, and gracious, and equable; and her look when we met
was like the benediction in answer to prayer, as Longfellow says. I went
about with a solemn feeling, as if I had just joined the Church. What
does a fellow want with slang, and pipes, and beer, and cheating other
fellows on the street, when he has such entertainments at home? And yet
it cuts me to the soul to look at her: I _must_ do something to bring
them together. Pretty soon we went back to New York.

XVIII.

AGAINST EARNESTNESS.

Jane, and even Mabel, have the idea that I am of light and shallow
nature; and sometimes I think they are right. It must be so; for your
profound and serious characters have a weakness for sorrow, and
luxuriate in woe--whereas I object to trouble of any kind, and cannot
get used to it. The house has been like a rural cemetery for near two
months, and it simply bores me. Hartman now prefers to dwell among the
tombs: he has lived these ten years in a graveyard, so to speak, under a
canopy of funereal gloom, and he thrives on it. He and Clarice are the
most superior persons I know; and they have gone and got themselves into
a peck, or rather several bushels, of trouble, about nothing at all.
They must like it, or why should they do it? I doubt if I can ever be
educated up to that point. I have the rude and simple tastes of a child:
sunshine seems to me better than shade (except during the heated term),
and pleasure more desirable than pain. I like to be comfortable myself,
and to have every one else so. Imagine Mabel getting miffed at me, or I
at her, over some little two-penny affair of unadvised expressions! She
often says unkind things to me: if I took an earnest view of life, and
were full of deep thought and fine feeling, probably I should have to
take her criticisms to heart, and go away in a hurry and never come
back. I sometimes make blunders worse than that one of Hartman's, and no
harm worth mentioning ever comes of them--though I do have to be careful
with the Princess. No doubt I am frivolous and superficial; but people
of my sort appear to get along more easily, and to make less trouble for
themselves and others, than those whose standards are so much higher.
If I had the managing of this