I call this an adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most touching and memorable adventure that can come into a woman's life.

'You see he hadna forgot,' she would say proudly, as if this was a compliment in which all her sex could share, and on her old tender face shone some of the elation with which Mrs.
Carlyle wrote that letter.
But there were times, she held, when Carlyle must have made his wife a glorious woman.

'As when ?' I might inquire.
'When she keeked in at his study door and said to herself, "The whole world is ringing with his fame, and he is my man!"' 'And then,' I might point out, 'he would roar to her to shut the door.' 'Pooh!' said my mother, 'a man's roar is neither here nor there.' But her verdict as a whole was, 'I would rather have been his mother than his wife.' So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all is well.
Furthermore, 'to mak siccar,' my father has taken the opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle.

He is to see that she does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly overrides her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's eloquence.

(We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) She is not interested in what Mr.Gladstone has to say; indeed she could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she gratefully gave up reading 'leaders' the day I ceased to write them.
But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer characters.