of her speech was an irritation: she acted, not on feeling, but
on duty.

There are faults which may yield in a wife to the stern lessons of
experience, or to a husband's warnings; but nothing can counteract false
ideas of religion. An eternity of happiness to be won, set in the scale
against worldly enjoyment, triumphs over everything and makes every
pang endurable. Is it not the apotheosis of egotism, of Self beyond the
grave? Thus even the Pope was censured at the tribunal of the priest and
the young devotee. To be always in the right is a feeling which absorbs
every other in these tyrannous souls.

For some time past a secret struggle had been going on between the ideas
of the husband and wife, and the young man was soon weary of a battle to
which there could be no end. What man, what temper, can endure the sight
of a hypocritically affectionate face and categorical resistance to his
slightest wishes? What is to be done with a wife who takes advantage
of his passion to protect her coldness, who seems determined on being
blandly inexorable, prepares herself ecstatically to play the martyr,
and looks on her husband as a scourge from God, a means of flagellation
that may spare her the fires of purgatory? What picture can give an idea
of these women who make virtue hateful by defying the gentle precepts of
that faith which Saint John epitomized in the words, "Love one another"?

If there was a bonnet to be found in a milliner's shop that was
condemned to remain in the window, or to be packed off to the colonies,
Granville was certain to see it on his wife's head; if a material of
bad color or hideous design were to be found, she would select it. These
hapless bigots are heart-breaking in their notions of dress. Want of
taste is a defect inseparable from false pietism.

And so, in the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville had
no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the theatres.
Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that hung between
his bed and Angelique's seemed figurative of his destiny. Does it not
represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done to death in all the prime
of life and beauty? The ivory of that cross was less cold than Angelique
crucifying her husband under the plea of virtue. This it was that lay
at the root of their woes; the young wife saw nothing but duty where
she should have given love. Here, one Ash Wednesday, rose the pale and
spectral form of Fas