love--Ida's, mine, even that
of her own father and mother. Good heavens! had ever a woman less
cause for doubt or complaint on that score!

Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their
own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault
with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought
that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in
sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of
these ways she was not always quite infallible. _On a les defauts de
ses qualites_; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very
noble quality indeed!

Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of
her married life, she soon became "_joliment degourdie_," as Barty
called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she
would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was
she always with just the right thing to say--or to withhold, if
silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the
world as a great man's wife--and a good and beautiful woman--was
always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent
among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for
self-assertion on her part whatever--without assumption of any kind.

It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to
exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no
doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of
the "Universal Fur Company, Limited."

[Illustration: "SARDONYX"]

How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a
man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no
sinecure! but she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and
management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to
her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for
many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of
her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women
of her time.

With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in
all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see
the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly
pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own
way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon
with, and incapable of the slightest fla