nd almost forgetting the heat.
"'Each stain of earthliness had passed away.' Ha;--yes. They will
pass away, and become instinct with beauty and grace." A dim idea
came upon her that when this happy time should arrive, no one
would claim her necklace from her, and that the man at the stables
would not be so disagreeably punctual in sending in his bill.
"'All-beautiful in naked purity!'" What a tawdry world was this, in
which clothes and food and houses are necessary! How perfectly that
boy-poet had understood it all! "'Immortal amid ruin!'" She liked the
idea of the ruin almost as well as that of the immortality, and the
stains quite as well as the purity. As immortality must come, and as
stains were instinct with grace, why be afraid of ruin? But then, if
people go wrong,--at least women,--they are not asked out any where!
"'Sudden arose Ianthe's soul; it stood all-beautiful--'" And so the
piece was learned, and Lizzie felt that she had devoted her hour to
poetry in a quite rapturous manner. At any rate she had a bit to
quote; and though in truth she did not understand the exact bearing
of the image, she had so studied her gestures, and so modulated her
voice, that she knew that she could be effective. She did not then
care to carry her reading further, but returned with the volume into
the house. Though the passage about Ianthe's soul comes very early
in the work, she was now quite familiar with the poem, and when, in
after days, she spoke of it as a thing of beauty that she had made
her own by long study, she actually did not know that she was lying.
As she grew older, however, she quickly became wiser, and was aware
that in learning one passage of a poem it is expedient to select
one in the middle, or at the end. The world is so cruelly observant
now-a-days, that even men and women who have not themselves read
their "Queen Mab" will know from what part of the poem a morsel is
extracted, and will not give you credit for a page beyond that from
which your passage comes.

After lunch Lizzie invited Miss Macnulty to sit at the open window of
the drawing-room and look out upon the "glittering waves." In giving
Miss Macnulty her due, we must acknowledge that, though she owned no
actual cleverness herself, had no cultivated tastes, read but little,
and that little of a colourless kind, and thought nothing of her
hours but that she might get rid of them and live,--yet she had a
certain power of insight, and could see a thin