gh to her. She
shrunk within herself. Every thing was withered and disenchanted. All
her poor little stock of romance seemed to her as disgusting as the
withered flowers and crumpled finery and half-melted ice-cream the
morning after a ball.

In this state, when she got a warm, true letter from John, who always
grew tender and affectionate when she was long away, couched in those
terms of admiration and affection that were soothing to her ear, she
really longed to go back to him. She shrunk from the dreary plainness
of truth, and longed for flattery and petting and caresses once
more; and she wrote to John an overflowingly tender letter, full of
longings, which brought him at once to her side, the most delighted of
men. When Lillie cried in his arms, and told him that she found New
York perfectly hateful; when she declaimed on the heartlessness of
fashionable life, and longed to go with him to their quiet home,--she
was tolerably in earnest; and John was perfectly enchanted.

Poor John! Was he a muff, a spoon? We think not. We understand well
that there is not a _woman_ among our readers who has the slightest
patience with Lillie, and that the most of them are half out of
patience with John for his enduring tenderness towards her.

But men were born and organized by nature to be the protectors of
women; and, generally speaking, the stronger and more thoroughly
manly a man is, the more he has of what phrenologists call the "pet
organ,"--the disposition which makes him the charmed servant of what
is weak and dependent. John had a great share of this quality. He was
made to be a protector. He loved to protect; he loved every thing that
was helpless and weak,--young animals, young children, and delicate
women.

He was a romantic adorer of womanhood, as a sort of divine mystery,--a
never-ending poem; and when his wife was long enough away from him to
give scope for imagination to work, when she no longer annoyed him
with the friction of the sharp little edges of her cold and selfish
nature, he was able to see her once more in the ideal light of first
love. After all, she was his wife; and in that one word, to a good
man, is every thing holy and sacred. He longed to believe in her and
trust her wholly; and now that Grace was going from him, to belong to
another, Lillie was more than ever his dependence.

On the whole, if we must admit that John was weak, he was weak where
strong and noble natures may most gracefully be