kings and hats, which were not in accord with her taste,
and only vexed her. Indeed, she resented wearing them, and could hardly
bring herself to thank him for them. At last, however, she induced him
to let her buy what she wanted with the presents of money which he might
give her.

On the whole Carmen fared pretty well, for he would sometimes give her a
handful of bills from his pocket, bidding her take ten dollars, and she
would coolly take twenty, while he shrugged his shoulders and declared
she would be his ruin. He had never repented of marrying her, in
spite of the fact that she did not always keep house as his mother and
grandmother had kept it; that she was gravely remiss in going to mass;
and that she quarrelled with more than one of her neighbours, who had an
idea that Spain was an inferior country because it was south of France,
just as the habitants regarded the United States as a low and inferior
country because it was south of Quebec. You went north towards heaven
and south towards hell, in their view; but when they went so far as to
patronize or slander Carmen, she drove her verbal stilettos home without
a button; so that on one occasion there would have been a law-suit for
libel if the Old Cure had not intervened. To Jean Jacques' credit, be it
said, he took his wife's part on this occasion, though in his heart he
knew that she was in the wrong.

He certainly was not always in the right himself. If he had been told
that he neglected his wife he would have been justly indignant. Also,
it never occurred to him that a woman did not always want to talk
philosophy or discuss the price of wheat or the cost of flour-barrels;
and that for a man to be stupidly and foolishly fond was dearer to a
woman than anything else. How should he know--yet he ought to have
done so, if he really was a philosopher--that a woman would want the
cleverest man in the world to be a boy and play the fool sometimes; that
she would rather, if she was a healthy woman, go to a circus than to a
revelation of the mysteries of the mind from an altar of culture, if her
own beloved man was with her.

Carmen had been left too much alone, as M. Fille had said to Judge
Carcasson. Her spirits had moments of great dullness, when she was ready
to fling herself into the river--or the arms of the schoolmaster or the
farrier. When she first came to St. Saviour's, the necessity of adapting
herself to the new conditions, of keeping faith with herself,