You need not hurry up from the office so early at night: she, bless her dear heart! does not feel lonely. You read to her a love tale; she interrupts the pathetic parts with directions to her seamstress. You read of marriages: she sighs, and asks if Captain So-and-So has left town! She hates to be mewed up in a cottage, or between brick walls; she does so love the Springs!
But, again, Peggy loves you; at least she swears it, with her hand on the Sorrows of Werther. She has pin-money which she spends for the Literary World and the Friends in Council. She is not bad looking, save a bit too much of forehead; nor is she sluttish, unless a négligé till three o’clock, and an ink stain on the forefinger be sluttish; but then she is such a sad blue!
You never fancied, when you saw her buried in a three-volumed novel, that it was anything more than a girlish vagary; and when she quoted Latin you thought, innocently, that she had a capital memory for her samplers.
But to be bored eternally about Divine Dante and funny Goldoni, is too bad. Your copy of Tasso, a treasure print of 1680, is all bethumbed and dog’s-eared, and spotted with baby gruel. Even your Seneca—an Elzevir—is all sweaty with handling. She adores La Fontaine, reads Balzac with a kind of artist-scowl, and will not let Greek alone.
You hint at broken rest and an aching head at breakfast, and she will fling you a scrap of anthology—in lieu of the camphor bottle—or chant the aἰaĩ aἰaĩ, of tragic chorus.
—The nurse is getting dinner; you are holding the baby; Peggy is reading Bruyère.
The fire smoked thick as pitch, and puffed out little clouds over the chimney place. I gave the fore-stick a kick, at the thought of Peggy, baby and Bruyère.
—Suddenly the flame flickered bluely athwart the smoke—caught at a twig below—rolled round the mossy oak-stick—twined among the crackling tree-limbs—mounted—lit up the whole body of smoke, and blazed out cheerily and bright. Doubt vanished with Smoke, and Hope began with Flame.