magnificent picture of cooeperative
living?--but better than dreary lodgings or isolated homes, especially
when a woman devoted her life to other than household duties. I replied
that I believed every ardent spirit at some time or another was
discontented with the beaten way, and dreamed of glorious possibilities
of associate life and labor, wherein all selfishness should be
suppressed, justice and all the beatitudes reign, and souls develop all
their capabilities scarce conscious of even the body's hampering; but
that practically the only successful lay experiment in communism I had
ever heard of was that early one of the Indians in Paraguay under the
care of the Jesuit missionaries--Phalansterians who wore their rosaries
around their necks because they had no pockets in which to carry them!

And I thought that people without bonds of kinship or close sympathy
would not happily bear being forced into incessant, intimate
companionship unless they were either saints or prodigies of
imperturbable courtesy.

Well, life was a choice of evils, she answered me, and their experiment
had so far succeeded very well. But I might judge for myself a little:
would I, with my husband, dine with them on either one of such and such
days the next week, to meet this confederate household assembled? This
was an advance I had not counted on. My especial interest was in the
child, and though I liked well enough for myself accepting an invitation
that promised to be something out of the common way in dinners, I was
hardly prepared to pledge Ronayne. He not only likes a good dinner, and
feels injured when he doesn't get it, but he is very particular as to
the society in which he eats it. He can be gloriously jolly and informal
when he likes; but he wouldn't be his father's son if he weren't what I
call just a bit snobbish about the people he will know in
England--London especially.

But if he was going in for the correct thing, why on earth did he
insist upon marrying me? Because I never was the correct thing, and
he fell it love with me when he was quite old enough to know better;
and after his friends had for years reckoned him as a fastidious,
foreordained bachelor; _he_ says because I was so wholly unlike the
young ladies of his generation that he was surprised out of himself.
And mamma told him all my faults that he didn't know already, and how
people had insisted before upon marrying me, and two or three times I
had been silly enough