bout one another. After this
point has been reached, it is as if a triangular marriage had taken
place, and, with the honeymoon comfortably over, we slip along in
thoroughly friendly fashion. I use no warmer word than "friendly"
because, in the first place, the highest tides of feeling do not visit
the coast of triangular alliances; and because, in the second place,
"friendly" is a word capable of putting to the blush many a more
passionate and endearing one.

Every one knows of our experiences in England, for we wrote volumes of
letters concerning them, the which were widely circulated among our
friends at the time and read aloud under the evening lamps in the
several cities of our residence.

Since then few striking changes have taken place in our history.

Salemina returned to Boston for the winter, to find, to her amazement,
that for forty odd years she had been rather overestimating it.

On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer
whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody "more
worthy than herself" was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in
the nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since
she was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this
time no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not
unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all
these disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood;
and perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband
and calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks
were filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to
remember their Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time,
forget Her.

Her chagrin was all the keener at losing this last aspirant to her
hand in that she had almost persuaded herself that she was as fond of
him as she was likely to be of anybody, and that, on the whole, she
had better marry him and save his life and reason.

Fortunately she had not communicated this gleam of hope by letter,
feeling, I suppose, that she would like to see for herself the light
of joy breaking over his pale cheek. The scene would have been rather
pretty and touching, but meantime the Worm had turned and dispatched a
letter to the Majestic at the quarantine station, telling her that he
had found a less reluctant bride in the person of her intimate friend
Miss Rosa Van Brunt; and so Francesca's drea