ak in the last!"

"You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil," said the
ever-personal and concretely-speaking Isabel, who could not look at a
mountain without thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he
had tried.

"O no, I couldn't, dear. It's very difficult being any poet at all,
though it's easy to be like one. But I've done with it; I broke with
the Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my office, looking so
shabby,--not unlike one of those poor shop-girls; and as I was very
well dressed from having just been to see you, why, you know, I felt
the difference. 'Well, my dear?' said I, not quite liking the look of
reproach she was giving me. 'You are groins to leave me,' she answered
sadly. 'Well, yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance business is
very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad appearance, your coming about
so in office hours, and in those clothes.' 'O,' she moaned out, 'you
used to welcome me at all times, out in the country, and thought me
prettily dressed.' 'Yes, yes; but this is Boston; and Boston makes a
great difference in one's ideas; and I'm going to be married, too.
Come, I don't want to seem ungrateful; we have had many pleasant times
together, I own it; and I've no objections to your being present at
Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I must draw the
line there.' She gave me a look that made my heart ache, and went
straight to my desk and took out of a pigeon hole a lot of papers,--odes
upon your cruelty, Isabel; songs to you; sonnets,--the sonnet, a mighty
poor one, I'd made the day before,--and threw them all into the grate.
Then she turned to me again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passed
out. I could hear the bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt
clicking against each step of the stairway, as she went slowly and
heavily down to the street." "O don't--don't, Basil," said his wife, "it
seems like something wrong. I think you ought to have been ashamed."

"Ashamed! I was heart broken. But it had to come to that. As I got
hopeful about you, the Muse became a sad bore; and more than once I
found myself smiling at her when her back was turned. The Muse doesn't
like being laughed at any more than another woman would, and she would
have left me shortly. No, I couldn't be a poet like our Morning-Street
friend. But see! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement
with cooks and second-girls."

They were frowzy serving-maids and silent