ry of the short but happy time of
my own courtship and marriage?" Here Mrs. Manning shed tears. The
memory must, indeed, have been a strong one, the unregenerated humorist
would have thought, to "keep up" such a weight as hers. But Bro was not
a humorist: that Mrs. Manning was fat was no more to him than that he
himself was lean. He had the most implicit belief in the romance of her
life, upon which she often expatiated; he knew all about the first time
she saw him, and how she felt; he knew every detail of the courtship.
This was only when Marion was absent, however; the mother, voluble as
she was, said but little on that subject when her daughter was in the
room.

"But Miss Marion is happy," again said Bro, when the suitorless period
was now five years old.

"No, she is not," replied the mother this time. "She begins to feel that
her life is colorless and blank; I can see she does. She is not an
ordinary girl, and needlework and housekeeping do not content her. If
she had an orphan asylum to manage, now, or something of that kind--But,
dear me! what would suit her best, I do believe, would be drilling a
regiment," added Mrs. Manning, her comfortable amplitude heaving with
laughter. "She is as straight as a ramrod always, for all her delicate,
small bones. What she would like best of all, I suppose, would be
keeping accounts; she will do a sum now rather than any kind of
embroidery, and a page of figures is fairly meat and drink to her. That
Miss Drough has, I fear, done her more harm than good: you can not make
life exactly even, like arithmetic, nor balance quantities, try as you
may. And, whatever variety men may succeed in getting, we women have to
put up with a pretty steady course of subtraction, I notice."

"I am sorry you do not think she is happy," said Bro thoughtfully.

"There you go!" said Mrs. Manning. "I do not mean that she is exactly
_un_happy; but you never understand things, Bro."

"I know it; I have had so little experience," said the other. But Bro's
experience, large or small, was a matter of no interest to Mrs.
Manning, who rambled on about her daughter.

"The Mannings were always slow to develop, Edward used to say: I
sometimes think Marion is not older now at heart than most girls of
eighteen. She has always been more like the best scholar, the
clear-headed girl at the top of the class, than a woman with a woman's
feelings. She will be bitterly miserable if she falls in love at last,
and