"

she had intoned; and, fixing her eye sternly on the butterfly in white
flannels, she had asked him with a telling emphasis what that meant to
him? With the sweetest smile in the world, he had leaned forward, sipped
his tea, gazed thoughtfully in the fire, and answered, with a polite
apology for the homeliness of the illustration, that it reminded him
most strongly of a tack fixed in the seat of a chair, with the attendant
circumstances! After a convulsive effort to include in one terrible
sentence all the scorn and regret and pity that she felt, Miss Gould had
decided that silence was best, and sat back wondering why she suffered
him one instant in her parlor. He took from the floor beside him at this
point a neat red volume, and, murmuring something about his inability to
do the poet justice, he began to read. For one, two, four minutes Miss
Gould sat staring; then she interrupted him coldly:

"And who is the author of that doggerel, Mr. Welles?"

"Edward Lear, dear Miss Gould--and a great man, too."

"I think I might have been spared--" she began with such genuine anger
that any but her lodger would have quailed. He, however, merely smiled.

"But the subtlety of it--the immensity of the conception--the power of
characterization!" he cried. "Just see how quietly this is treated."

And to her amazement she let him go on; so that a chance visitor,
entering unannounced, might have been treated to the delicious spectacle
of a charming middle-aged gentleman in white flannels reading, near a
birch fire and a priceless pewter tea-service, to a handsome middle-aged
woman in black silk, the following pregnant lines:

"There was an old person of Bow,
Whom nobody happened to know,
So they gave him some soap,
And said coldly, 'We hope
You will go back directly to Bow!'

And the illustration is worthy of the text," he added enthusiastically,
as he passed the volume to her.

She had no sense of humor, but she had a sense of justice, and it
occurred to her that after all an agreement was an agreement. If to
listen to insinuating inanities was the price of his attention, she
would pay it. She had borne more than this in order to do good.

So the readings continued, a source of unmixed delight to her lodger and
a great spiritual discipline to herself.

As the days grew milder their intimacy, profiting by the winter
seclusion, led him to accompany her on her various errands. She was at