made Cutter seem so despicable.

He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-grey hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them.
Her face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very colour and
shape of anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in
her full, intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls
in rustling, steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling
aigrettes.

Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her wash-bowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: 'Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!'

They quarrelled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they
went to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to
the town at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about
unfaithful husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in
a disguised handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the
mutilated journal in the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping
into the space from which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel
all morning about whether he ought to put on his heavy or his light
underwear, and all evening about whether he had taken cold or not.

The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief
of these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband
it was plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs.
Cutter had purposely remained childless, with the determination to
outlive him and to share his property with her 'people,' whom he
detested. To this she would reply that unless he changed his mode
of life, she would certainly outlive him. After listening to her
insinuations about his physical soundness, Cutter would resume his
dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at the hour when his wife
most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out to the track with his
trott