had no disdain, but only the broadest charity, for men who make a living.
It was odd how few her smiles were, and droll how much sweetness--what a
sane winsomeness--she managed to radiate without them. I left her in her
clean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and entered
my own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessary
enthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and the
best piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make a
virtue of necessity, but I had never before seen one make a conviction,
comfort, and joy of it, and I should try to like the Baron, I said, if
only for her sake.

Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him.
Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he
was not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowed
somewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and a
smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of
whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant
enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but
thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages,
ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeous
wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend
"opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace
and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and
curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and
function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I
resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't
believe her!

I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in
the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the