ressed the same pillow for forty
years and fancy yourselves united. Psha, does she cry out when you have
the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the toothache? Your artless
daughter, seemingly all innocence and devoted to her mamma and her
piano-lesson, is thinking of neither, but of the young Lieutenant with
whom she danced at the last ball--the honest frank boy just returned
from school is secretly speculating upon the money you will give him,
and the debts he owes the tart-man. The old grandmother crooning in the
corner and bound to another world within a few months, has some business
or cares which are quite private and her own--very likely she is
thinking of fifty years back, and that night when she made such an
impression, and danced a cotillon with the Captain before your father
proposed for her: or, what a silly little overrated creature your wife
is, and how absurdly you are infatuated about her--and, as for your
wife--O philosophic reader, answer and say,--Do you tell her all? Ah,
sir--a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine--all
things in nature are different to each--the woman we look at has not the
same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one
and the other--you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with
some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us. Let us return,
however, to the solitary Smirke.

Smirke had one confidante for his passion--that most injudicious woman,
Madame Fribsby. How she became Madame Fribsby, nobody knows: she had
left Clavering to go to a milliner's in London as Miss Fribsby--she
pretended that she had got the rank in Paris during her residence in
that city. But how could the French king, were he ever so much disposed,
give her any such title? We shall not inquire into this mystery,
however. Suffice to say, she went away from home a bouncing young lass;
she returned a rather elderly character, with a Madonna front and a
melancholy countenance--bought the late Mrs. Harbottle's business for
a song--took her elderly mother to live with her; was very good to the
poor, was constant at church, and had the best of characters. But there
was no one in all Clavering, not Mrs. Portman herself, who read so many
novels as Madame Fribsby. She had plenty of time for this amusement,
for, in truth, very few people besides the folks at the Rectory and
Fairoaks employed her; and by a perpetual perusal of such works (which
were by no means s