ls of such wretched weariness, that it would be a relief to me
to be a little less comfortable if only I might enjoy a more brilliant
existence. But Charles is not rich; sometimes I think he is poor, and
however much I may desire change, I cannot have it. Heigho! and, what is
worse, I haven't had a new dress in a year; I who so love dress, and
become it so well! Why, if it is my lot to go shabby, and tie up my
dancing ringlets with faded ribbons, was I made with the figure of a
fairy and given a temperament which, without any effort on my part,
makes me, diminutive as I am, the centre of every group I enter? If I
were plain, or shy, or even self-contained, I might be happy here, but
now--There! there! I will go kiss little William, and lay Loreen's baby
arm about my neck and see if the wicked demons will fly away. Charles is
too busy for me to intrude upon him in that horrid Flower Parlor.

* * * * *

I was never superstitious till I entered this house; but now I believe
in every sort of thing a sane woman should not. Yesterday, after a
neglect of five years, I brought out my diary. To-day I have to record
in it that there was a reason for my doing so. Obadiah Trohm has
returned home. I saw him this morning leaning over his fence in the same
place and in very much the same attitude as on that day when he
frightened me so, a month before my wedding.

But he did not frighten me to-day. He merely looked at me very sharply
and with a less offensive admiration than in the early days of our first
acquaintance. At which I made him my best courtesy. I was not going to
remind him of the past in our new relations, and he, thankful perhaps
for this, took off his hat with a smile I am trying even yet to explain
to myself. Then we began to talk. He had travelled everywhere and I had
been nowhere; he wore the dress and displayed the manners of the great
world, while I had only a hungry desire to do the same. As for fashion,
I needed all my beauty and the fading sparkle of my old animation to
enable me to hold up my head before him.

But as for liking him, I did not. I could admire his appearance, but he
himself attracted me no more than when he had words of angry fury on his
tongue. He is a gentleman, and one who has seen the world, but in other
ways he is no more to be compared with my Charles than his pert new
house, built in his absence, with the grand old structure with whose
fatality he once thr