_; but we never see these whims in a woman who is
happy.

These symptoms, light as gossamer, resemble the clouds which scarcely
break the azure surface of the sky and which they call flowers of the
storm. But soon their colors take a deeper intensity.

In the midst of this solemn premeditation, which tends, as Madame de
Stael says, to bring more poetry into life, some women, in whom virtuous
mothers either from considerations of worldly advantage of duty or
sentiment, or through sheer hypocrisy, have inculcated steadfast
principles, take the overwhelming fancies by which they are assailed
for suggestions of the devil; and you will see them therefore trotting
regularly to mass, to midday offices, even to vespers. This false
devotion exhibits itself, first of all in the shape of pretty books of
devotion in a costly binding, by the aid of which these dear sinners
attempt in vain to fulfill the duties imposed by religion, and long
neglected for the pleasures of marriage.

Now here we will lay down a principle, and you must engrave it on your
memory in letters of fire.

When a young woman suddenly takes up religious practices which she has
before abandoned, this new order of life always conceals a motive highly
significant, in view of her husband's happiness. In the case of at least
seventy-nine women out of a hundred this return to God proves that they
have been inconsistent, or that they intend to become so.

But a symptom more significant still and more decisive, and one that
every husband should recognize under pain of being considered a fool, is
this:

At the time when both of you are immersed in the illusive delights of
the honeymoon, your wife, as one devoted to you, would constantly carry
out your will. She was happy in the power of showing the ready will,
which both of you mistook for love, and she would have liked for you to
have asked her to walk on the edge of the roof, and immediately, nimble
as a squirrel, she would have run over the tiles. In a word, she found
an ineffable delight in sacrificing to you that _ego_ which made her a
being distinct from yours. She had identified herself with your nature
and was obedient to that vow of the heart, _Una caro_.

All this delightful promptness of an earlier day gradually faded away.
Wounded to find her will counted as nothing, your wife will attempt,
nevertheless, to reassert it by means of a system developed gradually,
and from day to day, with increased energ