little bitterly. "Poor Nat! I am only another trial added to your
long list. Your beliefs, your ideals are meaningless to me--mere
narrow-minded dogmas, stifling thought. Nellie was the wife Nature
had intended for you, so soon as she had lost her beauty and with it
all her worldly ideas. Fate was maturing her for you, if only we had
known. As for me, I ought to have been the wife of an artist, of a
poet." Unconsciously a glance from her ever restless eyes flashed
across the table to where Horatio Camelford sat, puffing clouds of
smoke into the air from a huge black meerschaum pipe. "Bohemia is my
country. Its poverty, its struggle would have been a joy to me.
Breathing its free air, life would have been worth living."

Horatio Camelford leant back with eyes fixed on the oaken ceiling.
"It is a mistake," said Horatio Camelford, "for the artist ever to
marry."

The handsome Mrs. Camelford laughed good-naturedly. "The artist,"
remarked Mrs. Camelford, "from what I have seen of him would never
know the inside of his shirt from the outside if his wife was not
there to take it out of the drawer and put it over his head."

"His wearing it inside out would not make much difference to the
world," argued her husband. "The sacrifice of his art to the
necessity of keeping his wife and family does."

"Well, you at all events do not appear to have sacrificed much, my
boy," came the breezy voice of Dick Everett. "Why, all the world is
ringing with your name."

"When I am forty-one, with all the best years of my life behind me,"