dmiration of the
guest's cheeks, gallantly requesting your wife to have the bouquet of
carnation pinks removed from the table, as they were so shamed by the
complexions of the ladies.

Of course it was gracefully worded in the plural, but your pallid wife
could not claim her share of it, and you should have realized the fact.
And the reason she could not was that she had sacrificed her health in
your service, in giving your children to you, and in losing her lover.

She adores her splendid babies, but she is still a woman and a
wife,--though you seem to ignore that she is anything but a mother.

Right about face, Mr. Gordon, and become the lover you were, and
jealousy will be driven from your threshold.

It is your own lack of thoughtfulness, your own tactless and tasteless
methods with your wife, which have caused the change in her manner. She
is not jealous, she is only lonely, heart-hungry, disillusioned.

You are less noble, less considerate, less tender, less sympathetic
than she believed. For the man to whom these adjectives can be applied
will guard, love, and cherish the wife of his youth, and the mother of
his children, before all other considerations; and he will understand
how sensitive a fading wife may be, and not confound that sensitiveness
with ignoble jealousy.

It is you, Charles Gordon, who must cure your wife of nerves, hysteria,
and incipient jealousy, not I.

To Mrs. Clarence St. Claire

_Concerning Her Husband_

I am sorry that your matrimonial barque meets so many rough winds while
hardly out of Honeymoon Bay.

Clarence and you seemed so deeply in love when I last saw you, six
months after your wedding, that I had hoped all might go well with you.

I knew the disposition of Clarence to be tainted with jealousy, but
hoped you would be able to eradicate it from his nature.

You know his poor mother suffered agonies from the infidelities of his
father before Clarence was born. She had married a handsome foreigner
with whom she was desperately enamoured, while he cared only for the
fortune she brought him.

While still in the full light of the honeymoon he began to indulge in
flirtations and amours, and poor Clarence, during the important prenatal
period of life, received the mark of suspicion and the tendency to
hypersensitiveness which then dominated the mother.

By the time Elise was born she had passed through the whole process, and
was passive and indifferent.

I cannot