eping on a packing-box.

"Now, Hero, how silly! Do have it your own way. I'll give it up."

"No,--let it be as you say. I forgot that it was a wife's duty to
submit."

"Nonsense, Hero! Do talk like a rational woman. Don't let us quarrel
like children."

"But it's so evident that I was in the right."

"My dear, I cannot concede that you were in the right; but I am willing
it should be as you say."

"Now I perfectly wonder, Leander, that you don't see how awkward your
way is. It would make me nervous every time I came into the room, and it
would be so dark in that corner that I never could see the notes."

"And I wonder, Hero, that a woman of your taste don't see how shutting
up that bow-window spoils the parlor. It's the very prettiest feature of
the room."

And so round and round they go, stating and restating their arguments,
both getting more and more nervous and combative, both declaring
themselves perfectly ready to yield the point as an oppressive exaction,
but to do battle for their own opinion as right and reason,--the animal
instinct of self-will meanwhile rising and rising and growing stronger
and stronger on both sides. But meanwhile in the heat of argument some
side-issues and personal reflections fly out like splinters in the
shivering of lances. He tells her, in his heat, that her notions are
formed from deference to models in fashionable life, and that she has no
idea of adaptation,--and she tells him that he is domineering, and
dictatorial, and wanting to have everything his own way; and in fine,
this battle is fought off and on through the day, with occasional
armistices of kisses and makings-up,--treacherous truces, which are all
broken up by the fatal words, "My dear, after all, you must admit _I_
was in the right," which of course is the signal to fight the whole
battle over again.

One such prolonged struggle is the parent of many lesser ones,--the
aforenamed splinters of injurious remark and accusation, which flew out
in the heat of argument, remaining and festering and giving rise to
nervous soreness; yet, where there is at the foundation real, genuine
love, and a good deal of it, the pleasure of making up so balances the
pain of the controversy that the two do not perceive exactly what they
are doing, nor suspect that so deep and wide a love as theirs can be
seriously affected by causes so insignificant.

But the cause of difficulty in both, the silent, unwatched, intense
power of sel