rules of their kind; but Lanse had of course broken them, he
wasn't a man for rules; a man of his age, too, would hardly keep the
rules made by a girl of nineteen. After repeated breakage of all her
well-regulated little canons, she had withdrawn herself, and kept aloof;
she had held herself superior to him, and had let him see that she did.
Winthrop could imagine the effect of all this upon Lanse!

But no matter what Lanse had done that annoyed her (and it was highly
probable that he had done a good deal), her duty as a wife, in
Winthrop's opinion, clearly was, and would to the end of time continue,
to remain with her husband--not to leave him, unless her life or the
welfare of her children should be in actual danger; that was what
marriage meant. The welfare of children included a great deal, of
course; he held that a wife was justified in separating them from a
father whose influence was injurious. But in this case there had been no
questions of the sort, Lanse was not violent, and there were no children
to think of. There was, indeed, nothing very wrong about Lanse save that
he was self-willed, and did quite as he pleased on all occasions. But
what he did was, after all, nothing very terrible; he was willing that
other people should do as they pleased, also; he was not a petty tyrant.
But this state of things had not satisfied his wife, who wished other
people, her husband first of all, to do as _she_ pleased. Why? Because
she was always sure that she was right! This slender, graceful woman
with the dark blue eyes and clear low voice had a will as strong as her
husband's. She had found, probably, that her tranquillity and what she
called her dignity--both inexpressibly dear to her--were constantly
endangered by this unmanageable husband, who paid not the slightest heed
to her axioms as to what was "right" and "not right," what was "usual"
(Lanse was never usual) and "not usual," but strode through and over
them all as though they did not exist. His course, indeed, made it
impossible for her to preserve unbroken that serenity of temper which
was her highest aspiration; for she was exactly the woman to have an
ideal of that sort, and to endeavor to live up to it; it was not
improbable that she offered her prayers to that effect every night.

All this was a very harsh estimate. But Winthrop's beliefs on these
subjects were rooted in the deepest convictions he possessed. Such a
character as the one he attributed to Mar