es--for she was once a student in Paris and has
romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying
glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden,
for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages
of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her
husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago,
memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which
love sometimes grants to his faithful servants.

At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the
advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking,
I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It
seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia,
however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years
before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of
the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how
thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and
developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women
and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart
the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she
were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause.
When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be
needed to keep her--her friend Irene too--from the barricades.

"Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can
hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when
pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear
her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or
direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to
ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women
the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives--a rebel in
all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured,
and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years.

Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as
in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming
up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely
technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her
more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper
acquaintance,