"But what does this extraordinary display of light mean?" ejaculated my aunt, the moment she entered the parlor from the dining-room. "It looks like the kingdom of heaven in here! Jules! Jules!" she called, "come and put out some of the light!"

Jules was at the front door letting in the usual Wednesday-evening visitor, but now he came running in immediately with his own invention in the way of a gas-stick,—a piece of broom-handle notched at the end,—and began turning one tap after the other, until the room was reduced to complete darkness.

"But what do you mean now, Jules?" screamed the old lady again.

"Pardon, madame," answered Jules, with dignity; "it is an accident. I thought there was one still lighted."

"An accident! An accident! Do you think I hire you to perform accidents for me? You are just through telling me that it was accident made you give me both soup and gumbo for dinner today."

"But accidents can always happen, madame," persisted Jules, adhering to his position.

The chandelier, a design of originality in its day, gave light by what purported to be wax candles standing each in a circlet of pendent crystals. The usual smile of ecstatic admiration spread over Jules\'s features as he touched the match to the simulated wicks, and lighted into life the rainbows in the prisms underneath. It was a smile that did not heighten the intelligence of his features, revealing as it did the toothless condition of his gums.

"What will madame have for her dinner tomorrow," looking benignantly at his mistress, and still standing under his aureole.

"Do I ever give orders for one dinner, with the other one still on my lips?"

"I only asked madame; there is no harm in asking." He walked away, his long stiff white apron rattling like a petticoat about him. Catching sight of the visitor still standing at the threshold: "Oh, madame, here is Mr. Horace. Shall I let him in?"

"Idiot! Every Wednesday you ask me that question, and every Wednesday I answer the same way. Don\'t you think I could tell you when not to let him in without your asking?"

"Oh, well, madame, one never knows; it is always safe to ask."

The appearance of the gentleman started a fresh subject of excitement.

"Jules! Jules! You have left that front door unlocked again!"

"Excuse me," said Mr. Horace; "Jules did not leave the front door unlocked. It was locked when I rang, and he locked it again most carefully after letting me in. I have been standing outside all the while the gas was being extinguished and relighted."

"Ah, very well, then. And what is the news?" She sank into her arm-chair, pulled her little card-table closer, and began shuffling the cards upon it for her game of solitaire. "I never hear any news, you know. She [nodding toward me] goes out, but she never learns anything. She is as stupid tonight as an empty bottle."

After a few passes her hands, which were slightly tremulous, regained some of their wonted steadiness and brilliancy of movement, and the cards dropped rapidly on the table. Mr. Horace, as he had got into the habit of doing, watched her mechanically, rather absent-mindedly retailing what he imagined would interest her, from his week\'s observation and hearsay. And madame\'s little world revolved, complete for her, in time, place, and personality.

It was an old-fashioned square room with long ceiling, and broad, low windows heavily curtained with stiff silk brocade, faded by time into mellowness. The tall white-painted mantel carried its obligation of ornaments well: a gilt clock which under a glass case related some brilliant poetical idyl, and told the hours only in an insignificant aside, according to the delicate politeness of bygone French taste; flanked by duplicate continuations of the same idyl in companion candelabra, also under glass; Sèvres, or imitation Sèvres vases, and a crowd of smaller objects to which age and rarity were slowly contributing an artistic value. An oval mirror behind threw replicas of them into another mirror, receiving in exchange the reflected portrait of madame in her youth, and in the partial nudity in which innocence was limned in madame\'s youth. There were besides mirrors on the other three walls of the room, all hung with such careful intent for the exercise of their vocation that the apartment, in spots, extended indefinitely; the brilliant chandelier was thereby quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the mere repetition of one original, a kind of phonographic echo.

The portrait of monsieur, madame\'s handsome young husband, hung out of the circle of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever they hang, always seems to surround the portraits of the dead.

Old as the parlors appeared, madame antedated them by the sixteen years she had lived before her marriage, which had been the occasion of their furnishment. She had traveled a considerable distance over the sands of time since the epoch commemorated by the portrait. Indeed, it would require almost documentary evidence to prove that she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the same Atalanta that had started out so buoyantly at sixteen.

Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over her head, pinned with gold brooches. Her white hair curled naturally over a low forehead. Her complexion showed care—and powder. Her eyes were still bright, not with the effete intelligence of old age, but with actual potency. She wore a loose black sack flowered in purple, and over that a black lace mantle, fastened with more gold brooches.

She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won; for she never hesitated to cheat to get out of a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.

Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders, and say, "Bah! lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.

He happened to mention mushrooms—fresh mushrooms. She threw down her cards before the words were out of his mouth, and began to call, "Jules! Jules!" Mr. Horace pulled the bell-cord, but madame was too excitable for that means of communication. She ran into the antechamber, and put her head over the banisters, calling, "Jules! Jules!" louder and louder. She might have heard Jules\'s slippered feet running from the street into the corridor and up-stairs, had she not been so deaf. He appeared at the door.

"But where have you been? Here I have been raising the house a half-hour, calling you. You have been in the street. I am sure you have been in the street."

"Madame is very much mistaken," answered Jules, with resentful dignity. He had taken off his white apron of waiter, and was disreputable in all the shabbiness of his attire as cook. "When madame forbids me to go into the street, I do not go into the street. I was in the kitchen; I had fallen asleep. What does madame desire?" smiling benevolently.

"What is this I hear? Fresh mushrooms in the market!"

"Eh, madame?"

"Fresh mushrooms in the market, and you have not brought me any!"

"Madame, there are fresh mushrooms everywhere in the market," waving his hand to show their universality.

"Everybody is eating them—"

"Old Pomponnette," Jules continued, "only this morning offered me a plate, piled up high, for ten cents."

"Idiot! Why did you not buy them?"

"If madame had said so; but madame did not say so. Madame said, \'Soup, Jules; carrots, rice,\'" counting on his fingers.

"And the gumbo?"

"I have explained that that was an accident. Madame said \'Soup,\'" enumerating his menu again; "madame never once said mushrooms."

"But how could I know there were mushrooms in the market? Do I go to market?"

"That is it!" and Jules smiled at the question thus settled.

"If you had told me there were mushrooms in the market—" pursued madame, persisting in treating Jules as a reasonable being.

"Why did not madame ask me? If madame had asked me, surely I would have told madame. Yesterday Caesar brought them to the door—a whole bucketful for twenty-five cents. I had to shut the door in his face to get rid of him," triumphantly.

"And you brought me yesterday those detestable peas!"

"Ah," shrugging his shoulders, "madame told me to buy what I saw. I saw peas. I bought them."

"Well, understand now, once for all: whenever you see mushrooms, no matter what I ordered, you buy them. Do you hear?"

"No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms unless madame orders them. Madame\'s disposition is too quick."

"But I do order them. Stupid! I do order them. I tell you to buy them every day."

"And if there are none in the market every day?"

"Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not want to see you. Ah, it is unendurable! I must—I must get rid of him!" This last was not a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It was merely a habitual exclamation.

During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning back in his arm-chair, raised his eyes, and caught the reflected portrait of madame in the mirror before him—the reflection so much softer and prettier, so much more ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed, seen in the mirror, that way, the portrait was as refreshing as the most charming memory. He pointed to it when madame, with considerable loss of temper, regained her seat.

"It is as beautiful as the past," he explained most unnaturally, for he and his friend had a horror of looking at the long, long past, which could not fail to remind them of—what no one cares to contemplate out of church. Making an effort toward some determination which a subtle observer might have noticed weighing upon him all the evening, he added: "And, apropos of the past—"

"Hein?" interrogated the old lady, impatiently, still under the influence of her irascibility about the mushrooms.

He moved his chair closer, and bent forward, as if his communication were to be confidential.

"Ah, bah! Speak louder!" she cried. "One would suppose you had some secret to tell. What secrets can there be at our age?" She took up her cards and began to play. There could be no one who bothered herself less about the forms of politeness.

"Yes, yes," answered Mr. Horace, throwing himself back into his chair; "what secrets can there be at our age?"

The remark seemed a pregnant one to him; he gave himself up to it. One must evidently be the age of one\'s thoughts. Mr. Horace\'s thoughts revealed him the old man he was. The lines in his face deepened into wrinkles; his white mustache could not pretend to conceal his mouth, worsened by the loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin hand that propped his head was crossed with blue, distended veins. "At the last judgment"—it was a favorite quotation with him—"the book of our conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."

But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.

"When that was painted, Josephine—"

Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame\'s ideas seemed to take that direction.

"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods."

"Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god with you all."

The allusion—a frequent one with Mr. Horace—was to madame\'s husband, who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her direction.

"Josephine, do you remember—in your memory—"

She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting? But she was not the woman to say, at a moment\'s notice, what she remembered or what she forgot.

"A woman\'s memory! When I think of a woman\'s memory—in fact, I do not like to think of a woman\'s memory. One can intrude in imagination into many places; but a woman\'s memory—"

Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in his youth that he wrote poetry—and it was said against him. It was evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation. And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.

"And a man\'s memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man—"

When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to be the way in life—or in imagination.

"That you should"—he paused with the curious shyness of the old before the word "love"—"that you two should—marry—seemed natural, inevitable, at the time."

Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on the marriage in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.

"But the natural—the inevitable—do we not sometimes, I wonder, perform them as Jules does his accidents?"

"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 ............