spirit. And Jessie she brought up so carefully that she never
even let her read "A Soul Untrammelled." Which, therefore,
naturally enough, Jessie did, and went on from that to a feast of
advanced literature. Mrs. Milton not only brought up Jessie
carefully, but very slowly, so that at seventeen she was still a
clever schoolgirl (as you have seen her) and quite in the
background of the little literary circle of unimportant
celebrities which 'Thomas Plantagenet' adorned. Mrs. Milton knew
Bechamel's reputation of being a dangerous man; but then bad men
are not bad women, and she let him come to her house to show she
was not afraid--she took no account of Jessie. When the elopement
came, therefore, it was a double disappointment to her, for she
perceived his hand by a kind of instinct. She did the correct
thing. The correct thing, as you know, is to take hansom cabs,
regardless of expense, and weep and say you do not know WHAT to
do, round the circle of your confidential friends. She could not
have ridden nor wept more had Jessie been her own daughter--she
showed the properest spirit. And she not only showed it, but felt
it.

Mrs. Milton, as a successful little authoress and still more
successful widow of thirty-two,--"Thomas Plantagenet is a
charming woman," her reviewers used to write invariably, even if
they spoke ill of her,--found the steady growth of Jessie into
womanhood an unmitigated nuisance and had been willing enough to
keep her in the background. And Jessie--who had started this
intercourse at fourteen with abstract objections to
stepmothers--had been active enough in resenting this. Increasing
rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until they
could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or the