thousand? That is what I never can tell. But I think that most probably
she is married, and that her husband is very much in business, and does
not share so much as he respects her tastes. I have no particular reason
for thinking that she has no children now, and that the sorrow for the one
she lost so long ago has become only a pensive silence, which, however, a
long summer twilight can yet deepen to tears.... Upon my word! Am I then
one to give way to this sort of thing? Madam, I ask pardon. I have no
right to be sentimentalizing you. Yet your face is one to make people
dream kind things of you, and I cannot keep my reveries away from it.

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have proposed
to write, and leave my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of a
fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without pain upon the
discomforts which they suffer at this stage of their joyous enterprise. At
the best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous
embarrassments: a package of shawls and parasols and umbrellas and India-
rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates into a
shapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with as great tenderness
as an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow the hand-bags
and to eddy about you in paper parcels; while the bottle of claret, that
bulges the side of one of the bags, and

"That will show itself without,"

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, gives a crushing touch
of disreputability to the whole affair. Add to this the fact that but half
the party have seats, and that the others have to sway and totter about
the car in that sudden contact with all varieties of fellow-men, to which
we are accustomed in the cars, and you must allow that these poor
merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when this part of their day's