ut her nothing would go
straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you
had forgotten. You don't think of anything, she thinks of everything!

You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and
noon. The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the
landing, talking with somebody's valet: she runs in on hearing or
seeing you. Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely
style, stopping to look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and
going like a person who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your
wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.

"Madame is still in bed," says the maid.

You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
quite hungry now.

You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
ready, she says it's because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
if everything is in disorder, it's all your fault. For everything
which goes awry she has this answer: "Well, you would get up so
early!" "He would get up so early!" is the universal reason. She makes
you go to bed early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all
day, because you would get up so unusually early.

Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, "Without me, you
would never get up!" To her friends she says, "My husband get up! If
it weren't for me, he never _would_ get up!"

To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, "A graceful
compliment to you, madame!" This slightly indelicate comment puts an
end to her boasts.

This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether
the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.

SMALL VEXATIONS.

You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.

Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving
his glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and
ribbons that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the
Champs Elysees can bear witness--you drive a good solid Norman horse
with a steady, family gait.

You have l