s of ease, he tried to compel his refined and delicate wife to
receive his paid paramours as her associates; and on her demurring, he
became mad with indignation and proceeded to discipline her, according
to the Englishman's time-honored right of violence. As a minor but
very embarrassing matter to a sensitive woman, he plunged into debt
and forced her to contend with and pacify his duns out of her private
fortune, and even worried her into an attempt to raise money for him
by pledging her annuity, though, luckily, no Jew in London was plucky
enough to take a long risk on the life of the wife of so brutal a
husband. This daily inferno of disgust and terror the woman endured
for three years, for the barbarous English law requires the woman, not
the man, to prove extreme cruelty besides adultery; and cruelty is
often not so easy to prove, for Englishmen, as a rule, do not beat
their wives on the housetops. It is generally a strictly boudoir
performance, with locked doors and the rabble excluded, as befits the
solemnity of such a marital right. At last, owing to the lieutenant's
culpable carelessness in castigation, she was able to go to court with
plenty of provable cruelty. But here again the barbarous English law
stepped in and said: "This is all very true, but wait a bit. You shall
have a decree _nisi_," which meant that she must wait six months and
then a certain musty, overpaid, and underworked humbug, styled the
Queen's Proctor, after hobnobbing with an attorney-general, would, if
his dinner agreed with him, confirm the decree and make it final.
During this suspense the ineffably mean uniform that had been
masquerading as a man was visited by an idea, and wrote a letter to
Mrs. Lynch-Blosse depicting himself as on the brink of starvation and
consumption, and begging for some money. The woman's pity was aroused.
She had once fancied for a brief while, with the undeveloped heart of
girlhood, that she liked this empty, tinkling symbol of a man. She
wrote him a kind letter enclosing the money. It takes but little
imagination to understand what such a creature would do with the cash;
that he would hasten to celebrate the success of his cunning by a
revel at which he could brag to some loose companion how neatly he had
cheated a generous and noble woman. But he did something more, almost
inconceivable in its baseness; he took that letter to the Queen's
Proctor and showed it to that archive of centuried insapience as a
proo