"'Are you sure?'

"'Positive.'"

Then, Reade's characters are perpetually doing the same thing. Josephine
and Margaret both seize their throats not to cry out; Josephine and
Margaret both kiss their babies alike,--a very pretty description of the
act, though:--

"The young mother sprang silently upon her child,--you would have
thought she was going to kill it,--her head reared itself again
and again, like a crested snake's, and again and again, and again
and again plunged down upon the child, and she kissed his little
body from head to foot with soft violence, and murmured through
her starting tears."

But not content with that, Margaret must reënact it. Then Gerard and
Alfred, returning from long absences, both find their only sister dead;
and the plot of three of the novels turns on the fact of long and
inexplicable absences on the part of the heroes. The Baroness de
Beaurepaire, who is flavored with what her maker calls the "congealed
essence of grandmamma," shares her horror of the jargon-vocabulary
equally with Mrs. Dodd, (the captain's wife, who "reared her children in
a suburban villa with the manners which adorn a palace,--when they
happen to be there"). There is a singular habit in the several works of
putting up marble inscriptions for folks before actual demise requires
it,--Hardie showing Lucy Fountain hers, Camille erecting one to Raynal.
All his heroines, as soon as they are crossed in love, invariably lose
their tempers, and invariably by the same process; all, without
exception, have violet eyes and velvet lips, (and sometimes the heroes