performed was that
of matrimony. Three and thirty years had passed; and, with every
advantage for supporting a wife, with a charming home all ready for
a mistress, John, as yet, had not proposed to be the defender and
provider for any of the more helpless portion of creation. The cause
of this was, in the first place, that John was very happy in the
society of a sister, a little older than himself, who managed his
house admirably, and was a charming companion to his leisure
hours; and, in the second place, that he had a secret, bashful
self-depreciation in regard to his power of pleasing women, which made
him ill at ease in their society. Not that he did not mean to marry.
He certainly did. But the fair being that he was to marry was a
distant ideal, a certain undefined and cloudlike creature; and, up
to this time, he had been waiting to meet her, without taking any
definite steps towards that end. To say the truth, John Seymour, like
many other outwardly solid, sober-minded, respectable citizens, had
deep within himself a little private bit of romance. He could not
utter it, he never talked it; he would have blushed and stammered and
stuttered wofully, and made a very poor figure, in trying to tell any
one about it; but nevertheless it was there, a secluded chamber
of imagery, and the future Mrs. John Seymour formed its principal
ornament.

The wife that John had imaged, his _dream_-wife, was not at all like
his sister; though he loved his sister heartily, and thought her one
of the best and noblest women that could possibly be.

But his sister was all plain prose,--good, strong, earnest,
respectable prose, it is true, but yet prose. He could read English
history with her, talk accounts and business with her, discuss
politics with her, and valued her opinions on all these topics as much
as that of any man of his acquaintance. But, with the visionary Mrs.
John Seymour aforesaid, he never seemed to himself to be either
reading history or settling accounts, or talking politics; he was off
with her in some sort of enchanted cloudland of happiness, where she
was all to him, and he to her,--a sort of rapture of protective
love on one side, and of confiding devotion on the other, quite
inexpressible, and that John would not have talked of for the world.

So when he saw this distant vision of airy gauzes, of pearly
whiteness, of sea-shell pink, of infantine smiles, and waving, golden
curls, he stood up with a shy desire to