"Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't
have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that
every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce--what a ridiculous
farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in
market, and bring me carrots!"

The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an
equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.

"One cannot tell. It seems so at the time. We like to think it so; it
makes it easier. And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked
forward to it--"

"Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend? Who in the world
wants to look back on it?" One could not doubt madame's energy of
opinion on that question to hear her voice. "We have done our future,
we have performed it, if you will. Our future! It is like the dinners
we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming
exasperated over the bad: but"--shrugging her shoulders--"since we
cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate," forcing a queen that
she needed at the critical point of her game.

"At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging
one's life to last until sixty, seventy, forever," correcting himself
as he thought of his friend, the dead husband. If madame had ever
possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she
had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.

"When I look back to that time,"--Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair
and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her