Her husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties.

At two o'clock came a light dinner--perhaps thrushes and chianti--from the _trattoria_; at six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed, roast chestnuts and grapes.

Debts there were none to vex the spirits of these prudent children of genius.

If a poet could not pay his butcher's and his baker's bills, Browning's sympathies were all with the baker and the butcher.

"He would not sleep," wrote his wife, "if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week "; and elsewhere: "Being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days." Perhaps some of this horror arose from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the more joyous mountings of the mind.