inner, drinking greatly, his lady opposite to him, looking
furtively at his face, though also speechless. Her silence annoyed him as
much as her speech; and he would peevishly, and with an oath, ask her why
she held her tongue and looked so glum, or he would roughly check her when
speaking, and bid her not talk nonsense. It seemed as if, since his
return, nothing she could do or say could please him.

When a master and mistress are at strife in a house, the subordinates in
the family take the one side or the other. Harry Esmond stood in so great
fear of my lord, that he would run a league barefoot to do a message for
him; but his attachment for Lady Esmond was such a passion of grateful
regard, that to spare her a grief, or to do her a service, he would have
given his life daily: and it was by the very depth and intensity of this
regard that he began to divine how unhappy his adored lady's life was, and
that a secret care (for she never spoke of her anxieties) was weighing
upon her.

Can any one, who has passed through the world and watched the nature of
men and women there, doubt what had befallen her? I have seen, to be sure,
some people carry down with them into old age the actual bloom of their
youthful love, and I know that Mr. Thomas Parr lived to be a hundred and
sixty years old. But, for all that, threescore and ten is the age of men,
and few get beyond it; and 'tis certain that a man who marries for mere
_beaux yeux_, as my lord did, considers his part of the contract at end
when the woman ceases to fulfil hers, and his love does not survive her
beauty. I know 'tis often otherwise, I say; and can think (as most men in
their own experience may) of many a house, where, lighted in early years,
the sainted lamp of love hath never been extinguished; but so there is Mr.
Parr, and so there is the great giant at the fair that is eight feet
high--exceptions to men--and that poor lamp whereof I speak, that lights at
first the nuptial chamber, is extinguished by a hundred winds and draughts
down the chimney, or sputters out for want of feeding. And then--and then
it is Chloe, in the dark, stark awake, and Strephon snoring unheeding; or
_vice versa_, 'tis poor Strephon that has married a heartless jilt, and
awoke out of that absurd vision of conjugal felicity, which was to last
for ever, and is over like any other dream. One and other has made his
bed, and so must lie in it, until that final day when life ends, and they
sl