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If perchance she remains at home, there are always plenty of visitors, principally young men, who will help her to chase the evening hours. And Melinda plays and sings to them, with her eyes glancing up and down, and now and then resting upon some enraptured listener, who leans over the piano and drinks in the amorous words as though they were addressed to him. Are they not, for the moment?

The society of her own sex Melinda cannot abide. She scoffs at female friendships; talking to a woman bores her more than listening to a sermon. Caresses of women, to her, are positively sickening. Their tenderness—bah! it is all affectation, assumed to make them look interesting! She well knows the pretty dears hate each other heartily, and would rather bite than kiss, if they dared to be natural.

Melinda is a childless wife. A child's innocent touch would have opened a chamber in her breast and let a saving angel in to tear the false god, Self, from its altar. A child's holy breath would have blown away some of this earth-dust gathered upon her soul, and clogging all its heavenly motions. A child's guileless fingers would have drawn the wife's hand into that of her husband, and turned her face to his by the magnetism of mutual interest in one beloved object, at whose feet their sympathies could meet and embrace. Yet she rejoices