ards to breakfast, between eleven and noon.
The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the landing,
talking with somebody's valet: she runs in on hearing or seeing you.
Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely style, stopping to
look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and going like a person
who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your wife, supposing that
she is up and dressed.

"Madame is still in bed," says the maid.

You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
quite hungry now.

You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
ready, she says it's because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
if everything is in disorder, it's all your fault. For everything which
goes awry she has this answer: "Well, you would get up so early!" "He
would get up so early!" is the universal reason. She makes you go to bed
early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all day, because you
would get up so unusually early.

Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, "Without me, you
would never get up!" To her friends she says, "My husband get up! If it
weren't for me, he never _would_ get up!"

To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, "A graceful
compliment to you, madame!" This slightly indelicate comment puts an end
to her boasts.

This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether the
inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.

SMALL VEXATIONS.

You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.

Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving his
glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and ribbons
that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the Champs
Elysees can bear witness--you drive a good solid Norman horse with a
steady, family gait.

You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity
slip of proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.

By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the
carriage. The vehicle is four