e editor of "The Food Regenerator," if
you please--and a dark, unwholesome looking, wizened little man, who I
am sure would have been the better for a good rubbing with sand-paper
and emery powder. His wife was a plaintive, helpless, hapless,
washed-out woman, who, sidling apologetically about in a frowsy costume
of some yellow-white woollen stuff, made me think of a dirty white
cat--a likeness I was sorry to have forced on me when I had heard a bit
of her history; for the only wonder is how she's kept courage enough to
go on dressing or living at all. It seems that _M. le mari_ is by way
of being a social as well as dietetic regenerator, and is as full of
uncomfortable fads as man can be. They have no fortune, unless you
reckon as such seven small children, and over and over again he's
thrown up a good appointment or salary because he "must be free to
write his convictions--great truths the world needs." And to lighten
matters still further, he believes that service should be bartered, not
paid for in coin; so they could almost never have a servant, and when
they did get one it was of course some poor wretch who was glad to
shelter herself on any terms for the moment, but who could be trusted
no more than puss in the dairy. Besides carrying her own fardel, this
poor wife was expected to fold and direct wrappers for her husband's
precious journal, he finding "mechanical writing too exhausting and
stultifying."

Next--let me see--two gentlemen, bachelors, one a pugnacious
fellow-countryman to whose tremendous r-r's my heart warmed in this
lisping land of Cockaigne--a proof-reader at one of the great publishing
houses; the other as curious a specimen as I've encountered--a man of
sixty or so, of courtly manners, an ex-Anglican parson, an ex-Catholic
convert, a present "seeker after truth"--a man who knows something about
everything and believes the last thing--but sure of nothing save that
this world's a comfortable place, and loving nothing, one would swear,
but his pug dog, a superb creature, fairly uncanny for wisdom, but a
vilely ill-tempered beast, gurr-ing if one but looked at it.

And three ladies make up, I believe, the tale of the household: a
rather young widow, charming in an unearthly, seeress-like
fashion--finest porcelain to her finger-tips, but frail as a breath; a
handsome, solid blonde girl, with cold blue eyes, and no gold in her
fair hair, studying to be what she calls "a healer"--an earnest
advocate