P'tit-Bleu
P'tit-bleu, poor P'tit-Bleu! I can't name her without a sigh; I can't think of her without a kind of heart-ache. Yet, all things considered, I wonder whether hers was really a destiny to sorrow over. True, she has disappeared; and it is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have to come to, what may have befallen her, in the flesh, since her disappearance. But when I remember those beautiful preceding years of self-abnegation, of great love, and pain, and devotion, I find myself instinctively believing that something good she must have permanently gained; some treasure that nothing, not the worst imaginable subsequent disaster, can quite have taken from her. It is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have done or suffered in the flesh; but in the spirit, one may hope, she cannot have gone altogether to the bad, nor fared altogether ill.
In the spirit! Dear me, there was a time when it would have seemed derisory to speak of the spirit in the same breath with P'tit-Bleu. In the early days of my acquaintance with her, for example, I should have stared if anybody had spoken of her spirit. If anybody had asked me to describe her, I should have said, "She is a captivating little animal, pretty and sprightly, but as soulless—as soulless as a squirrel." Oh, a warm-blooded little animal, good-natured,
