e would make her dear Adolphe expiate his
obedience to the execrable precepts of the _Physiology of Marriage_.

A TRUCE.

This trouble doubtless occurs sufficiently often and in different ways
enough in the existence of married women, for this personal incident
to become the type of the genus.

The Caroline in question here is very pious, she loves her husband
very much, her husband asserts that she loves him too much, even: but
this is a piece of marital conceit, if, indeed, it is not a
provocation, as he only complains to his wife's young lady friends.

When a person's conscience is involved, the least thing becomes
exceedingly serious. Madame de ----- has told her young friend, Madame
de Fischtaminel, that she had been compelled to make an extraordinary
confession to her spiritual director, and to perform penance, the
director having decided that she was in a state of mortal sin. This
lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of thirty-six years,
thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her upper
lip is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle,
her gait noble--she is a woman of quality.

Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ----- has made her friend
(nearly all pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly,
on the pretext of converting her),--Madame de Fischtaminel asserts
that these qualities, in this Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a
victory of religion over a rather violent natural temper.

These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror.

This lady's Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two
months, in April, immediately after the forty days' fast that Caroline
scrupulously observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her
husband, she expected him day by day. From one hope to another,

"Conceived every morn and deferred every eve."

She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which
had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for
husband would arrive at an early hour.

When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been
absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with
her toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first
betrothed.

This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively
personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o'clock mass.
She proposed to hear a low