"You are glad that we made this act of reparation, Jane?" he said to her one day.
"Reparation?" She hesitated, and then said, "I know that I made many mistakes when I was a law to myself. You are my law now, Bruce."
"But you are satisfied that it was right to give back the money?" he insisted.
"Oh, of course! The money was unlucky! It made you uncomfortable too. And I look on it as a free gift from Swendon here to the poor little babies," taking her boy on her knee and stroking his curls. "But," she added in a low voice, "the money was mine. I was quite right when I burned the will."
Neckart laughed good-humoredly, and touched the horses with his whip. There is no man living who loves his wife more tenderly; and Jane is the most simple and prosaic of women. Yet there are times when she seems, even to him, a woman whose acquaintance he has scarcely made, and whom he can never hope to know better.
Rebecca Harding Davis
OUIDA'S NOVELS.
For a number of years the novels of Ouida have been the delight of their readers and the scorn and laughing stock of reviewers. Every new volume that has appeared has given a thrill of occasionally guilty delight to those whose studies are confined to the shelves of the circulating library, while critics have beaten the air with their attacks against this writer's frequent coarseness of tone, her hodge-podge of learning, and the superfine elegance which makes the air of most of her stories so heavy and enervating. Nothing could show more thoroughly the futility of criticism than the powerlessness of all the evil-minded notices of her many books. The reviewer may have spoken words of wisdom that would have honored Solomon, but the public did not care how inaccurate Ouida's Latin quotations and classical references were: they were entertained by her novels, and disregarded him who denounced her, just as those who are running to a house where they will hear music, breathe perfumes and see fine dresses pass by the hungry man who stands outside shaking his fist and growling at pleasure-seekers. People who are anxious to waltz do not care to stop and discuss with political economists the advisability of giving up luxuries, nor to hear the band begin the best of Beethoven's symphonies: they want to hear the opening notes of one of Strauss's compositions. The same love of amusement is at the root of all novel-reading—unless indeed it be a feeling of social duty which brings so many readers to George Eliot's novels—and Ouida is pretty sure to give her admirers a full dose of highly-seasoned entertainment which cannot fail to please unsensitive palates.