u will forgive me, if I say, you cannot be too
careful how you allow his views to act on your own sense of right and
wrong."

"What!--George? Oh, dear friend, it is only his nonsense! He will take
any side for the time, only to hear himself talk. But he _is_ the best
fellow that ever breathed. Oh, if you only knew his excellence as well
as I do!"

"My dear Lulu!" I expostulated, greatly pained to see her glowing face
and the almost tearful sparkle of her eyes, as she defended her cousin,
"your husband is a great deal the best guide for you,--in action, and I
presume in opinion. At all events, you are safest under the shadow of
his wing. There is the truest peace for a wife."

Whether she guessed what was in my mind I don't know; I did not try much
to conceal it. But she shook her curls away from her face as if
irritated, and answered in a tone from which all the animation had been
quenched,--

"No. I have been a child. I am one no longer. Don't ask me to go back. I
am a living, feeling, understanding woman! George himself allows it is
perfectly shocking to be treated as I am,--a mere toy! a plaything!"

George again! I could scarcely restrain my impatience. Yet how to make
her understand?

"Don't you see, Lulu, that George ought never to have dared to name the
subject of your and your husband's differences? and do you not see that
you can never discuss the subject with anybody with propriety? If,
unhappily, all is not as you, as we, wish it, let us hope for the effect
of time and right feeling in both; but don't, don't allow any gentleman
to talk to you of your husband's treatment of you!"

Lulu listened in quiet wonderment, while, with agitated voice and
trembling mouth, I addressed her as I had never before done. I had
constantly avoided speaking to her on the subject. She looked at me now
with clear, innocent eyes, (I am so glad to remember them!) and placed
her two hands affectionately on my shoulders.

"I know what you mean,--and what you fear. That I shall say something,
or do something undignified, or possibly wrong. But that, with God's
help, I shall never do. Such happiness as I can procure, aside from my
husband, and which I had a right to expect through him,--such enjoyment
as comes from intellectual improvement and the exercise of my faculties,
this is surely innocent pleasure, this I shall have. And George,--you
must not blame him for being indignant, when he sees me treated so
unworthily,--or for