the pier. Then she
plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for
Professor Huxley's lectures.

For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on
molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred
new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river
Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical,
subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of
Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve.
Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her
existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower
into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor.
It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the
sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who
watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down
the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her
rest--a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful.
She has found--as she tells us--her work at last; and yet in the life
that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at
any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls
Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of
the nature of woman.

Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her
life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of
human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has
never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new
power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in
her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of
ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her
decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness
and true womanhood.

LA FEMME PASSEE.

Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
personal value, so much of their natural _raison d'etre_, that when
these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as
if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
be loved as girls are