ravens about first-class, or keep a maid and a
governess with one in various continental cities where she chose, as an
eccentric whim, to abide and study art? What would he have said to my
gloves in those earlier days when I earned nothing, and most of my
allowance, beyond board and lodging, went for paints, and four pairs of
dark, carefully chosen gloves had to go through the year? What to my
lodgings at the tailor's--a poor cobbler-tailor, in Dresden? What to my
lunches of _Wurst_ beer and black bread? What to the concerts, where,
in smoke and a three-penny seat, I heard music as good as plenty which
costs me ten shillings to a guinea in London? What to all the
cheek-by-jowl encounters with the peasants in our cheap, rapturously
happy sketching tours? Bah! the poor Irishman! As if he could guess
anything about it! Why should I think twice of his "amateur talent" and
other little pin-pricks when the stiff, starved man never had, in his
whole life, one such happy day of honest work, utter freedom, and
simplest, blissfullest pleasures as have been mine by scores? Be easy,
Ronayne. Not for the Bohemian daughter-in-law shall apoplexy smite the
sovereign of Castle _Starched-stiff-O_!--which sacrilegious parody
shall be my only revenge.

And if I portray my baby in every week of her life, her father turns
her to account no less. She is beginning to chatter like a wren, and
Ronayne has a notebook devoted to her earliest attempts at speech--the
sounds, as she is progressively able to make them--the easily-conquered
ones, the impregnable rock-fortresses, the turns, substituted letters.
Sometimes I get quite furious over this anatomical process. My darling
says something with the dearest, sweetest, small voice:

"Oh, Ronayne!" I cry. "Did you hear? Three words together--'Pease,
papa, tugar!'" And I smother her in ecstasy.

"Yes, love," says Ronayne. "And do you notice how she can manage s
before a, and not before u? This morning I shook her, and nurse asked
her, 'What does papa do?' 'S-ake a baby,' she answered--but she never
says sugar. And there's the same----"

"Oh, you vivisecter," I broke in; "I'll have you to know, sir, that
_my_ baby's pretty lispings are not to be treated like the rudimental
language of a philologist's offspring! Put up that abominable book this
instant! Did a cruel father, my lammie, spear his own child with a
wicked pin, and stick her up in a case?"

I _am_ a happy woman, Susie. Too happy; I'm fr