glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
occasions, and this night was not one of them.

Half a pound of black grapes completed their shopping, and then, with
their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.

Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
face, Beauty was a great cook--like all good women, she was as earthly
in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
wise combination--and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
at these Bohemian feasts.

You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
sausages--I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
cigar without first cutting off the end--and oh! to hear again their
merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.

Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing himself in the setting-out of
the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
an altar--as indeed it was,--studying the effect of the dish of
tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.