about
him showed good feeling on her part. _De mortuis_, etc....

Of one thing we feel quite certain--that if, at the time we made this
lady's acquaintance, any chance friend of hers or her daughter's--say,
for instance, Laetitia Wilson, Sally's old school-friend and present
music-colleague--had been told that Mrs. Nightingale, of Krakatoa
Villa, No. 7, Glenmoira Road, Shepherd's Bush, W., had been the
heroine of divorce proceedings under queer circumstances, that her
husband wasn't dead at all, and that that dear little puss Sally was
Goodness-knows-who's child, we feel certain that the information would
have been cross-countered with a blank stare of incredulity. Why, the
mere fact that Mrs. Nightingale had refused so many offers of marriage
was surely sufficient to refute such a nonsensical idea! Who ever
heard of a lady with a soiled record refusing a good offer of marriage?

But while we are showing our respect for what the man in the street
says or thinks, and the woman in the street thinks and says, are we
not losing sight of a leading phrase of the symphony, sonata,
cantata--whatever you like to call it--of Mrs. Nightingale's life? A
phrase that steals in, just audibly--no more, in the most _strepitoso_
passage of the stormy second movement--a movement, however, in which
the proceedings of the Divorce Court are scarcely more audible,
_pianissimo legato_, a chorus with closed lips, all the stringed
instruments _sordini_. But it grows and grows, and in _allegro con
fuoco_ on the voyage home, and only leaves a bar or two blank, when
the thing it metaphorically represents is asleep and isn't suffering
from the wind. It breaks out again _vivacissimo accelerando_ when Miss
Sally (whom we allude to) wakes up, and doesn't appreciate Nestle's
milk. But it always grows, and in due course may be said to become
the music itself.

More intelligibly, Mrs. Nightingale became so wrapped up in her baby,
that had seemed to her at first a cruel embarrassment--a thing to be
concealed and ignored--that very soon she really had no time to think
about where she broke her molasses-jug, as Uncle Remus says. The new
life that it had become hers to guard took her out of herself, made
her quite another being from the reckless and thoughtless girl of two
years ago.

As time went on she felt more and more the value of the newcomer's
indifference to her extraction and the tragedy that had attended it.
A living creature, with a stupendou