k to prevent my defending myself, while you are driving
one mad. How dare you taunt me with being a pensioner on your
brother's bounty? I'll go up to town again and take lodgings there.
I need not be beholden to any aristocrat of them all. I have my own
station in the real world,--the world of intellect; I have my own
friends; I have made myself a name without his help; and I can live
without his help, he shall find!"

"Which name were you speaking of?" rejoins she looking up at him, with
all her native Irish humour flashing up for a moment in her naughty
eyes. The next minute she would have given her hand not to have said
it; for, with a very terrible word, Elsley springs to his feet and
dashes out of the room.

She hears him catch up his hat and cloak, and hurry out into the rain,
slamming the door behind him. She springs up to call him back, but
he is gone;--and she dashes herself on the floor, and bursts into an
agony of weeping over "young bliss never to return"? Not in the least.
Her principal fear is, lest he should catch cold in the rain. She
takes up her work again, and stitches away in the comfortable
certainty that in half an hour she will have recovered her temper, and
he also; that they will pass a sulky night; and to-morrow, by about
mid-day, without explanation or formal reconciliation, have become as
good friends as ever. "Perhaps," says she to herself, with a woman's
sense of power, "if he be very much ashamed and very wet, I'll pity
him and make friends to-night."

Miserable enough are these little squabbles. Why will two people, who
have sworn to love and cherish each other utterly, and who, on the
whole, do what they have sworn, behave to each other as they dare for
very shame behave to no one else? Is it that, as every beautiful thing
has its hideous antitype, this mutual shamelessness is the devil's
ape of mutual confidence? Perhaps it cannot be otherwise with beings
compact of good and evil. When the veil of reserve is withdrawn from
between two souls, it must be withdrawn for evil, as for good, till
the two natures, which ought to seek rest, each in the other's inmost
depths, may at last spring apart, confronting each other recklessly
with,--"There, you see me as I am; you know the worst of me, and I of
you; take me as you find me--what care I?"

Elsley and Lucia have not yet arrived at that terrible crisis: though
they are on the path toward it,--the path of little carelessnesses,
rudenesse