what a prize he is winning." "Oh! do look at those lovely ribbon-bows!"
"You darling, how happy you must be." "Real Valenciennes!" Then a whisper
in the lady's ear, and her reply, "Oh, don't, Nelly!" So they would chirp
over their treasures, as in Rabelais they chirped over their cups; and
every thing would be done in due order till the wedding-day, when mamma,
who had strained her sinews and the commandments to bring the match
about, would weep and look indignantly at the unhappy bridegroom. "I
_hope_ you'll be kind to her, Robert." Then in a rapid whisper to the
bride: "Mind, you _insist_ on Wyman's flushing the drains when you come
back; servants are so careless and dirty too. Don't let him go about by
himself in Paris. Men are so _queer_, one never knows. You _have_ got the
pills?" And aloud, after these _secreta_, "God bless you, my dear;
good-bye! _cluck_, _cluck_, good-bye!"

There were stranger things written in the manuscript pages that Lucian
cherished, sentences that burnt and glowed like "coals of fire which hath
a most vehement flame." There were phrases that stung and tingled as he
wrote them, and sonorous words poured out in ecstasy and rapture, as in
some of the old litanies. He hugged the thought that a great part of what
he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page
might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner
meaning. He dreamed night and day over these symbols, he copied and
recopied the manuscript nine times before he wrote it out fairly in a
little book which he made himself of a skin of creamy vellum. In his
mania for acquirements that should be entirely useless he had gained some
skill in illumination, or limning as he preferred to call it, always
choosing the obscurer word as the obscurer arts. First he set himself to
the sever practice of the text; he spent many hours and days of toil in
struggling to fashion the serried columns of black letter, writing and
rewriting till he could shape the massive character with firm true hand.