ONE:The thrillingness was slightly shorn of its vibrations by the return of her mother, who had a great deal to say about the felicitous manner in which she had opened the bazaar. She had brought back with her a small plush monkey climbing a string, and a realistic representation of a spiders web, with a woolly spider sitting in the middle of it. The rim of the web was fitted with hooks, so that you could hang it up anywhere. She selected the base of the pink clock as the most suitable site.The return to Yokohama was accomplished without any incident of consequence. Fred was a little disappointed to think that their lives had not been in peril. "Just a little danger for the fun of the thing," he remarked to Frank; and at one time on the way he was almost inclined to gloominess when he reflected on the situation. "There hasn't been any attack upon us," he said to himself, "when there might have been something of the kind just as well as not. Not that I wanted any real killing, or anything of the sort, but just a little risk of it to make things lively. It's really too bad."
FORE:"Like! Why, I'm just that dead-gone with curiosity that if I don't hear it it'll e'en a'most kill me--aw, haw! haw! haw!"
FORE:But other things extraneous to the temple had come in with him as he entered, like flies through an opened door, and still buzzed about him. His wifes want of comprehension was one of them. It was not often that Mrs Goodford had the power to annoy him so thoroughly as she had done to-day, but when she did, all that Emmeline had to contribute to the situation was such a sentence as, What a pity you and Mamma worry each other so. She did not understand, and though he told himself that in thirty years he should have got used to that, he found now and then, and to-day with unusual vividness, that he had not done so. She had never become a companion to him; he had never found in her that for which ultimately a man is seeking, though at the time he may not know it, when he goes a-wooing. A mouth, an eyebrow, the curve of a limb may be his lure, and having attained it he may think for a few years of passion that in gaining it he has gained what he sought, but unless he has indeed got that which unconsciously he desired, he will find some day when the gray ash begins to grow moss-like on his burning coals, that though his children{35} are round him, there is but a phantom opposite to him. The romance of passion has burned itself out, and from the ashes has no ph?nix arisen with whom he can soar to the sun. He desired the mouth or the eyebrow: he got them, and now in the changing lineaments he can scarcely remember what that which so strangely moved him was like, while in the fading of its brightness nothing else has emerged.
