onnet to it."

"You may if you choose, provided you don't publish it."

"You may trust me for that. I am not one of those who anatomise their
own married happiness for the edification of the whole public, and
make fame, if not money, out of their own wives' hearts."

"How I should hate you, if you did! Not that I believe their fine
stories about themselves. At least, I am certain it's only half the
story. They have their quarrels, my dear, just as you and I have but
they take care not to put them into poetry."

"Well, but who could? Whether they have a right or not to publish the
poetical side of their married life, it is too much to ask them to
give you the unpoetical also."

"Then they are all humbugs, and I believe, if they really love their
wives so very much, they would not be at all that pains to persuade
the world of it."

"You are very satirical and spiteful, ma'am."

"I always am when I am pleased. If I am particularly happy, I always
long to pinch somebody. I suppose it's Irish--

"'Comes out, meets a friend, and for love knocks him down.'"

"But you know, you rogue, that you care to read no poetry but love
poetry."

"Of course not every woman does, but let me find you publishing any
such about me, and see what I will do to you! There, now I must go
to my work, and you go and write something extra superfinely grand,
because I have been so good to you. No. Let me go; what a bother you
are. Good-bye."

And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had
been for a week past.

His happiness, truly, was only on the surface. The old wound had been
salved--as what wound cannot be?--by woman's love and woman's wit
but it was not healed. The cause of his wrong doing, the vain,
self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was
destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the
punishment of it.

Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley
Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have
Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a
despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, "Ah, if he had been
as we are!"

Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and
he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly
out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes
of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy. One cannot
heartily