f
misunderstandings, tiffs, quarrels, and reconciliations. I considered
that all this belonged of right to a well-conducted three-years'
engagement, and did not take it too much to heart when my well-bred,
rather provincial little sweetheart, who had grown up in the atmosphere
of the petty capital, occasionally gave her vagabond _fiance_ a little
moral lesson. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I was foolish, always
to report my varied adventures with absolute candor. There were no very
serious matters among them; and the few cases of real human weaknesses
and sins I kept to myself--shut up in a sincerely remorseful heart. But
she found fault even with the _tone_ of my 'sketches from two
hemispheres.' Good heavens! it is easily comprehensible that the poor
child, living as she did among such absurd surroundings, could not have
much taste for a free life out in the world! Thrown entirely on
herself, watched over by a hundred eyes in a narrow, starched, formal
society--I once wrote to her that she was only so serious beyond her
years because she had had to fill, as it were, a mother's place to
herself, and be her own governess and duenna. And, besides all this,
there was her uncle's frightful example--for she could not long remain
ignorant of his habit of compensating himself for outward
respectability by private orgies at his bachelor clubs and _petits
soupers_.

"Only let the three years be over, I thought to myself, and we will
soon weed out the tares that have sprung up between our roses. But I
did not know the vigor of the ground in which all this bad crop had
grown up. Nor did I know how much the years between seventeen and
twenty signified in such a girl's life.

"At last, then, I arrived at home, and found--but, no!" He checked
himself abruptly, and made a sharp cut at the air with his cane. "Why
should I bore you with a detailed story of a domestic comedy that has
only a decidedly unfavorable likeness to 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and,
instead of ending with the reconciliation between Benedict and
Beatrice, finished with a ridiculous eternal separation? For isn't it
almost as laughable as lamentable that two lovers, who for three whole
years, the world over, have been extravagantly fond of one another,
should count the days till they could fall again on one another's
necks, and then should not be able to get on together for six weeks?
And all this only because--as old Goethe says--man strives for liberty,
woman