she had in the course of an hour and a half attained. And in
discovering this I shall be able to present her to my reader with a
little more circumstance.

She sat before the fire in a rather masculine posture. I would not
willingly be rude, but the fact remains--a posture in which she
would not, I think, have sat for her photograph--leaning back in a
chintz-covered easy-chair, all the lines of direction about her
parallel with the lines of the chair, her arms lying on its arms,
and the fingers of each hand folded down over the end of each
arm--square, straight, right-angled,--gazing into the fire, with
something of the look of a sage, but one who has made no discovery.

She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild
reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied
with the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and
patient endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help
knowing to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only
such was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty,
that what it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to
have been a comfort to him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction
went so far that, although the fire kept burning away in perfect
content before her, enhanced by the bellowing complaint of the wind
in the chimney, she yet came nearer thinking than she had ever been
in her life. Now thinking, especially to one who tries it for the
first time, is seldom, or never, a quite comfortable operation, and
hence Helen was very near becoming actually uncomfortable. She was
even on the borders of making the unpleasant discovery that the
business of life--and that not only for North Pole expeditions,
African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and such like, but for every