tions with
crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are
equal to the game of love-making,--providing that the players can
be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch
of heart not only destroys the pleasure of the game, but makes the
player awkward and incapable and robs him of his skill. And thus it
is that there are many people who cannot play the game at all. A
deficiency of some needed internal physical strength prevents the
owners of the heart from keeping a proper control over its valves,
and thus emotion sets in, and the pulses are accelerated, and feeling
supervenes. For such a one to attempt a game of love-making, is as
though your friend with the gout should insist on playing croquet. A
sense of the ridiculous, if nothing else, should in either case deter
the afflicted one from the attempt. There was no such absurdity with
our friend Mrs. Dobbs Broughton and Conway Dalrymple. Their valves and
pulses were all right. They could play the game without the slightest
danger of any inconvenient result;--of any inconvenient result,
that is, as regarded their own feelings. Blind people cannot see
and stupid people cannot understand--and it might be that Mr. Dobbs
Broughton, being both blind and stupid in such matters, might
perceive something of the playing of the game and not know that it
was only a game of skill.

When I say that as regarded these two lovers there was nothing of
love between them, and that the game was therefore so far innocent, I
would not be understood as asserting that these people had no hearts
within their bosoms. Mrs. Dobbs Broughton probably loved her husband
in a sensible, humdrum way, feeling him to be a bore, knowing him to
be vulgar, aware that he often took a good deal more wine than was
good for him, and that he was almost as uneducated as a hog. Yet she
loved him, and showed her love by taking care that he should have
things for dinner which he liked to eat. But in this alone there were
to be found none of the charms of a fevered existence, and therefore
Mrs. Dobbs Broughton, requiring those charms for her comfort, played
her little game with Conway Dalrymple. And as regarded the artist
himself, let no reader presume him to have been heartless because he
flirted with Mrs. Dobbs Broughton. Doubtless he will marry some day,
will have a large family for which he will work hard, and will make a
good husband to some stout lady who will be careful i