ls should be
married before they are women! The woman comes at length, and finds she
is forestalled--that the prostrate and mutilated Dagon of a girl's
divinity is all that is left her to do the best with she can! But,
thank God, in the faithfully accepted and encountered responsibility,
the woman must at length become aware that she has under her feet an
ascending stair by which to climb to the woman of the divine ideal.

There was at present, however, nothing to be called thought in the mind
of Letty. She had even lost much of what faculty of thinking had been
developed in her by the care of Cousin Godfrey. That had speedily
followed the decay of the aspiration kindled in her by Mary. Her whole
life now--as much of it, that is, as was awake--was Tom, and only Tom.
Her whole day was but the continuous and little varied hope of his
presence. Most of the time she had a book in her hands, but ever again
book and hands would sink into her lap, and she would sit staring
before her at nothing. She was not unhappy, she was only not happy. At
first it was a speechless delight to have as many novels as she
pleased, and she thought Tom the very prince of bounty in not merely
permitting her to read them, but bringing them to her, one after the
other, sometimes two at once, in spendthrift profusion. The first thing
that made her aware she was not quite happy was the discovery that
novels were losing their charm, that they were not sufficient to make
her day pass, that they were only dessert, and she had no dinner. When
it came to difficulty in going on with a new one long enough to get
interested in it, she sighed heavily, and began to think that perhaps
life was rather a dreary thing--at least considerably diluted with the
unsatisfactory. How many of my readers feel the same! How few of them
will recognize that the state of things would indeed be desperate were
it otherwise! How many would go on and on being only butterflies, but
for life's dismay! And who would choose to be a butterfly, even if life
and summer and the flowers were to last for ever!

"I would," I fancy this and that reader saying.

"Then," I answer, "the only argument you are equal to, is the fact that
life nor summer nor the flowers do last for ever."

"I suppose I am made a butterfly," do you say? "seeing I prefer to be
one."

"Ah! do you say so, indeed? Then you begin to excuse yourself, and what
does that mean? It means that you are no butterfly, for a