ting in Lent, of Total Abstinence, commanded in a
severe tone--and Granville did not deem it advisable to write in his
turn to the Pope and take the opinion of the Consistory on the proper
way of observing Lent, the Ember days, and the eve of great festivals.

His misfortune was too great! He could not even complain, for what
could he say? He had a pretty young wife attached to her duties,
virtuous--nay, a model of all the virtues. She had a child every year,
nursed them herself, and brought them up in the highest principles.
Being charitable, Angelique was promoted to rank as an angel. The old
women who constituted the circle in which she moved--for at that time it
was not yet "the thing" for young women to be religious as a matter of
fashion--all admired Madame de Granville's piety, and regarded her,
not indeed as a virgin, but as a martyr. They blamed not the wife's
scruples, but the barbarous philoprogenitiveness of the husband.

Granville, by insensible degrees, overdone with work, bereft of conjugal
consolations, and weary of a world in which he wandered alone, by the
time he was two-and-thirty had sunk into the Slough of Despond. He hated
life. Having too lofty a notion of the responsibilities imposed on him
by his position to set the example of a dissipated life, he tried to
deaden feeling by hard study, and began a great book on Law.

But he was not allowed to enjoy the monastic peace he had hoped for.
When the celestial Angelique saw him desert worldly society to work at
home with such regularity, she tried to convert him. It had been a real
sorrow to her to know that her husband's opinions were not strictly
Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if her husband
should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so that she
could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell. Thus
Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments, the
narrow views by which his wife--fancying she had achieved the first
victory--tried to gain a second by bringing him back within the pale of
the Church.

This was the last straw. What can be more intolerable than the blind
struggle in which the obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a
lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to
which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his
home. Everything there was unendurable. His children, broken by their
mother's frigid despotism, dare