wn valuation.

At home, however, M. d'Aiglemont was modest. Instinctively he felt
that his wife, young though she was, was his superior; and out of this
involuntary respect there grew an occult power which the Marquise was
obliged to wield in spite of all her efforts to shake off the burden.
She became her husband's adviser, the director of his actions and his
fortunes. It was an unnatural position; she felt it as something of a
humiliation, a source of pain to be buried in the depths of her heart.
From the first her delicately feminine instinct told her that it is a
far better thing to obey a man of talent than to lead a fool; and that
a young wife compelled to act and think like a man is neither man nor
woman, but a being who lays aside all the charms of her womanhood along
with its misfortunes, yet acquires none of the privileges which our
laws give to the stronger sex. Beneath the surface her life was a bitter
mockery. Was she not compelled to protect her protector, to worship a
hollow idol, a poor creature who flung her the love of a selfish husband
as the wages of her continual self-sacrifice; who saw nothing in her but
the woman; and who either did not think it worth while, or (wrong quite
as deep) did not think at all of troubling himself about her pleasures,
of inquiring into the cause of her low spirits and dwindling health? And
the Marquis, like most men who chafe under a wife's superiority,
saved his self-love by arguing from Julie's physical feebleness a
corresponding lack of mental power, for which he was pleased to pity
her; and he would cry out upon fate which had given him a sickly girl
for a wife. The executioner posed, in fact, as the victim.

All the burdens of this dreary lot fell upon the Marquise, who still
must smile upon her foolish lord, and deck a house of mourning with
flowers, and make a parade of happiness in a countenance wan with secret
torture. And with this sense of responsibility for the honor of
both, with the magnificent immolation of self, the young Marquise
unconsciously acquired a wifely dignity, a consciousness of virtue which
became her safeguard amid many dangers.

Perhaps, if her heart were sounded to the very depths, this intimate
closely hidden wretchedness, following upon her unthinking, girlish
first love, had roused in her an abhorrence of passion; possibly she had
no conception of its rapture, nor of the forbidden but frenzied bliss
for which some women will renounce a