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airs and graces is painfully ludicrous, it is but an awkward caricaturing of her former self.

What has the weary, dreary, faded, jaded wreck of brilliant womanhood to fall back upon? What consosolation—what refuge is hers? Is there none to be found in her husband's sheltering arms? No; he is tired at last, of his youthful idolatry. In his own house he has never had a snug, quiet corner, an especial arm-chair, where he might sit, in dressing-gown and slippers, with that solace of manhood, a newspaper, in his hand, and he has gradually sought. the society of men, the club-room, or the card-table as a substitute for the fireside of home. It is too late for Melinda to turn to him and seek, in his long slighted devotion, repayment for the neglect of the world; too late to find herself rejuvenescent through her husband's love, as Michelet maintains that a woman may be. Her bitterest retribution comes through an instinctive but tardy knowledge that there must be a joy, she never tasted, in reposing upon one true heart, without fear of change; a happiness beyond her conception, in hoping for and hoping with, in soothing and being soothed by another self; in clinging to one who needs her, whose life is incomplete without her; who makes her proudly glad in the consciousness that whatever she may not be to others, she is all in all to him.

But this comfort shall never be hers; and the desolate, dethroned sovereign looks with envious