d saying a thing merely and only because he feels it.
Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being
dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to
make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to
introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields
unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but
to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of
elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to
the arrangement of the domestic _menage_, lead him daily to perceive a
hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.

Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved,
not provoked,--who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make
good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have
we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and
forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now
sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.

But there is another side of the picture,--where the wife, provoked and
indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen
arrows of her woman's wit searches and penetrates every joint of the
husband's armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more culpable in
this sort of conflict.

Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends
employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given
them only to harass and provoke,--thrusting and piercing with a
certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could
have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly
thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly
miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.

For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that
crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what
miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!--a dinner underdone,
too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish
broken!--and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous,
very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by
double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built, and coal
burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,--_their
happiness_. Better cold coffee, smoky tea