r species of
entertainment than grand dinners and dull assemblies.

Adelaide had attempted with a high hand at once to overturn the whole
system of Altamont House, and had failed. She had declared her
detestation of dinners, and been heard in silence. She had kept her room
thrice when they were given, but without success. She had insisted upon
giving a ball, but the Duke, with the most perfect composure, had
peremptorily declared it must be an assembly. Thus baffled in all her
plans of domestic happiness, the Duchess would have sought her pleasures
elsewhere. She would have lived anywhere but in her own house associated
with everybody but her own husband and done everything but what she had
vowed to do. But even in this she was thwarted. The Duke had the same
precise formal notions of a lady's conduct abroad, as well as her
appearance at home; and the very places she would have most wished to go
to were those she was expressly prohibited from ever appearing at.

Even all that she could have easily settled to her own satisfaction by
the simple apparatus of a separate establishment carried on in the same
house; but here too she was foiled, for his Grace had stubborn notions
on that score also, and plainly hinted that any separation must be final
and decided; and Adelaide could not yet resolve upon taking so
formidable a step in the first year of her marriage. She was therefore
compelled to drag the chain by which, with her own will, she had bound
herself for life to one she already despised and detested. And bound she
was, in the strictest sense of the metaphor; for, though the Duke had
not the smallest pleasure in the society of his wife, he yet attached
great ideas of propriety to their being always seen together, side by
side. Like his sister, Lady Matilda, he had a high reverence for
appearances, though he had not her _finesse _in giving them effect. He
had merely been accustomed to do what he thought looked well, and gave
him an air of additional dignity. He had married Aidelaide because he
thought she had a fine presence, and would look well as Duchess of
Altamont; and, for the same reason, now that she was his wedded wife, he
thought it looked well to be seen always together. He therefore made a
point of having no separate engagements; and even carried his sense of
propriety so far, that as regularly as the Duchess's carriage came to
the door the Duke was prepared to hand her in, in due form, and take his
station