priceless secret of aerial stability by the British Empire. The
exact particulars of the similarity never came to light, but
apparently the lady had, in a fit of high-minded inadvertence,
had gone through the ceremony of marriage with, one quotes the
unpublished discourse of Mr. Butteridge--"a white-livered skunk,"
and this zoological aberration did in some legal and vexatious
manner mar her social happines. He wanted to talk about the
business, to show the splendour of her nature in the light of its
complications. It was really most embarrassing to a press that
has always possessed a considerable turn for reticence, that
wanted things personal indeed in the modern fashion. Yet not too
personal. It was embarrassing, I say, to be inexorably
confronted with Mr. Butteridge's great heart, to see it laid open
in relentlesss self-vivisection, and its pulsating dissepiments
adorned with emphatic flag labels.

Confronted they were, and there was no getting away from it. He
would make this appalling viscus beat and throb before the
shrinking journalists--no uncle with a big watch and a little
baby ever harped upon it so relentlessly; whatever evasion
they attempted he set aside. He "gloried in his love," he said,
and compelled them to write it down.

"That's of course a private affair, Mr. Butteridge," they would
object.

"The injustice, sorr, is public. I do not care either I am up
against institutions or individuals. I do not care if I am up
against the universal All. I am pleading the cause of a woman, a
woman I lurve, sorr--a noble woman--misunderstood. I intend to