over me before she had read three lines aloud. Had I known
their purport, I doubt whether even Eveena's persuasion and the
Autocrat's power together could have induced me to sign them. They
were in very truth contracts of marriage--if marriage it can be
called. The Sovereign had done me the unusual, but not wholly
unprecedented, favour of selecting half a dozen of the fairest maidens
of those waiting their fate in the Nurseries of his empire; had
proffered on my behoof terms which satisfied their ambition, gratified
their vanity, and would have induced them to accept any suitor so
recommended, without the insignificant formality of a personal
courtship. It had seemed to him only a gracious attention to complete
my household; and he had furnished me with a bevy of wives, as I
presently found he had selected a complete set of the most intelligent
_amlau, carvee,_ and _tyree_ which he could procure. Without either
the one or the other, the dwelling he had given me would have seemed
equally empty or incomplete.

This mark of royal favour astounded and dismayed me more than Eveena
herself. If she had entertained the wish, she would hardly have
acknowledged to herself the hope, that she might remain permanently
the sole partner of my home. But so sudden, speedy, and wholesale an
intrusion thereon she certainly had not expected. Even in Mars, a
first bride generally enjoys for some time a monopoly of her husband's
society, if she cannot be said to enchain his affection. It was hard,
indeed, before the thirtieth day after her marriage, to find herself
but one in a numerous family--the harder that our union had from the
first been close, intimate, unrestrainedly confidential, as it can
hardly be where neither expects that the tie can remain exclusive; and
because she had learned to realise and rest upon such love as belongs
to a life in which woman, never affecting the independence of coequal
partnership, has never yet sunk by reaction into a mere slave and toy.
It was hard, cruelly hard, on one who had given in the first hour of
marriage, and never failed to give, a love whose devotion had no
limit, no reserve or qualification; a submission that was less
self-sacrifice or self-suppression than the absolute surrender of
self--of will, feeling, and self-interest--to the judgment and
pleasure of him she loved: hard on her who had neither thought nor
care for herself as apart from me.

When I understood to what I had actually co