itself with you! Leave the merrymaking for
appreciative friends. So rules Barbara. Not a birthday, then, nor the
date of their marriage. The occasion was in some flash struck from
Being, the memory of which enriches them,--in a mood that for an hour
held them in strong grasp, in the utterance of a word charged with
destiny, in the avowal of their love if their love awaited avowal.
Whatever the cause, they honoured it with a will.

Barbara's eyes flashed, her cheeks were sweetly suffused, and her voice
was vibrant. Earl, too, was at his best. My heart loved this man who had
lain all his life with death. His health is at its bad worst this
winter, which fact made of the "Celebration" a rather heart-rending
affair. He has been obliged to abandon the _Journal_, but we hope he can
stay with the school. Meanwhile, his chronic invalidism of body and
purse does not too much affect him. He keeps his charm of tenderness and
strength. He rivets his pupils to him almost as he riveted his Barbara.

I have discovered my proof of this couple's happiness. It is that I have
always taken it for granted. Simple, is it not? And absolute. Often in
their presence I catch myself imagining their mutual lives and seeing
vaguely the graces that each brings to each. "How she must delight him!"
I say. "How his eyes speak to her!" "They can never come to the end of
each other," and so on. The ordinary married couple so often brings a
sense of distressed surprise: "How can these two foot it together?"
"How did it happen?" "How can it go on?"

Last night counted to me. Your father and I have had such evenings, but
I did not think I could do it all over again. We spoke with the fire
(and conceit) of young students, exciting ourselves with expired
theories, hoping old hopes, smarting under blows that perhaps had long
ceased to fall. What then? What if we were ill-read in the facts? We
could not have been wrong in the feeling. For the old hope that has been
proven vain, a new; for the ancient hurt, a modern wrong, as great and
as crying. It was good to feel that we had not grown too wise to harbour
thoughts of change and redress, or too much ironed out with doctrine to
be resigned. I confess it is long since I have eaten my heart in fury,
in impatience, in wildness, but last night we awoke the radical in one
another. We condemned the system. We placed ourselves outside the
regime, refusing aught at its hands, registering our protest, hating the
inordi