or my selfishness,
by experiencing an alarm little less violent than her own outpouring of
feeling.

Touching the incidents, emotions, and language of the next half hour,
it is not my intention to be very communicative. Anna was ingenuous,
unreserved, and, if I might judge by the rosy blushes that suffused
her sweet face, and the manner in which she extricated herself from my
protecting arms, I believe I must add, she deemed herself indiscreet in
that she had been so unreserved and ingenuous.

"We can now converse more calmly, Jack," the dear creature resumed,
after she had erased the signs of emotion from her cheeks--"more calmly,
if not more sensibly."

"The wisdom of Solomon is not half so precious as the words I have just
heard--and as for the music of spheres--"

"It is a melody that angels only enjoy."

"And art not thou an angel?"

"No, Jack, only a poor, confiding girl; one instinct with the affections
and weaknesses of her sex, and one whom it must be your part to sustain
and direct. If we begin by calling each other by these superhuman
epithets, we may awake from the delusion sooner than if we commence with
believing ourselves to be no other than what we really are. I love you
for your kind, excellent, and generous heart, Jack; and as for these
poetical beings, they are rather proverbial, I believe, for having no
hearts at all."

As Anna mildly checked my exaggeration of language--after ten years of
marriage I am unwilling to admit there was any exaggeration of idea--she
placed her little velvet hand in mine again, smiling away all the
severity of the reproof.

"Of one thing, I think you may rest perfectly assured, dear girl," I
resumed, after a moment's reflection. "All my old opinions concerning
expansion and contraction are radically changed. I have carried out the
principle of the social-stake system in the extreme, and cannot say that
I have been at all satisfied with its success. At this moment I am the
proprietor of vested interests which are scattered over half the world.
So far from finding that I love my kind any more for all these
social stakes, I am compelled to see that the wish to protect one, is
constantly driving me into acts of injustice against all the others.
There is something wrong, depend on it, Anna, in the old dogmas of
political economists!"

"I know little of these things, Sir John, but to one ignorant as
myself, it would appear that the most certain security for the right