eeing that your husband wants to join this riding party, you can,
for his sake, lay aside your indifference, and enter, with a hearty
good-will, into the proposed pastime."

"And why cannot he, seeing that I do not care to ride, deny himself
a little for my sake, and not drag me out against my will? Is all
the yielding and concession to be on my side? Must his will rule in
everything? I can tell you what it is, Rose, this will never suit
me. There will be open war between us before the honeymoon has waxed
and waned, if he goes on as he has begun."

"Hush! hush, Irene!" said her friend, in a tone of deprecation. "The
lightest sense of wrong gains undue magnitude the moment we begin to
complain. We see almost anything to be of greater importance when
from the obscurity of thought we bring it out into the daylight of
speech."

"It will be just as I say, and saying it will not make it any more
so," was Irene's almost sullen response to this. "I have my own
ideas of things and my own individuality, and neither of these do I
mean to abandon. If Hartley hasn't the good sense to let me have my
own way in what concerns myself, I will take my own way. As to the
troubles that may come afterward, I do not give them any weight in
the argument. I would die a martyr's deaths rather than become the
passive creature of another."

"My dear friend, why will you talk so?" Rose spoke in a tone of
grief.

"Simply because I am in earnest. From the hour of our marriage I
have seen a disposition on the part of my husband to assume
control--to make his will the general law of our actions. It has not
exhibited itself in things of moment, but in trifles, showing that
the spirit was there. I say this to you, Rose, because we have been
like sisters, and I can tell you of my inmost thoughts. There is a
cloud already in the sky, and it threatens an approaching storm."

"Oh, my friend, why are you so blind, so weak, so self-deceived? You
are putting forth your hands to drag down the temple of happiness.
If it fall, it will crush you beneath a mass of ruins; and not you
only, but the one you have so lately pledged yourself before God and
his angels to love."

"And I do love him as deeply as ever man was loved. Oh that he knew
my heart! He would not then shatter his image there. He would not
trifle with a spirit formed for intense, yielding, passionate love,
but rigid as steel and cold as ice when its freedom is touched. He
should have known me