the reason for our collapse was not in Jenny but in me. Had I
listened to my austere partner I should have waited only until she
had searched for and found her uncle's will. This she did; and as
the instrument proved entirely satisfactory, my duty was then to
proceed about our business and remember that better an egg to-day
than a hen to-morrow. Only an artist's fond pride intervened;
nothing but my vanity, my consciousness of power to excel, upset the
rightful climax. We were, indeed, both artists, but how incomparably
the greater she! How severe and direct, how scornful of needless
elaboration! She belonged, mind and body, to the finest period of
Greek art, and echoed their stern, soulless simplicity and
perfection. Had she won her way with me, we should be living now to
enjoy the fruits of our accomplishment.

But though she did not win her way, yet, in defeat, her final,
glorious deed was to intercept the death intended for me, that I
might still live. Loyal to the last, she sacrificed herself,
forgetting, in that supreme moment, how life for me without her
could possess no shadow of compensation. When Jenny shook off the
dust of the world, I was ready and willing to do the same. As for
that future life, in which I most potently believe, since she and I
have merited a like treatment, we shall share eternity together and
so be in heaven, whatever the Great Contriver may desire to the
contrary. Yet who shall presume to dogmatize? "There is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." And what the Almighty
Mind may be pleased to think of any human performance is for the
present hidden with Him alone. He did not make the tiger to eat
grass or the eagle to feed on honey.

My wife's deeper sanity and clearer vision always inclined her to