nappreciated qualities. From the fact that her husband spends a large
part of each day away from her, either in attending to his business or
in following a sport, she infers that he has ceased to love her. When he
returns in the evening, she locks herself into her room, and, having
thus assured to herself solitude, she converts it, by an easy process,
into the studied neglect of an unfeeling husband.

She now gathers round herself a select company of two or three female
friends, whom the easy good-nature of her husband permits to stay in his
house for months at a time. Into their sympathetic ears she pours the
story of her woes, and gradually organises them into a trained band of
disciplined conspirators, who make it their constant object to defend
the wife by thwarting the husband. They have their signs and their
pass-words. If the callous male, for the enjoyment of whose hospitality
they seem to gain an additional zest by affecting to despise and defy
him, should intimate at the dinner-table that he has ventured to make
some arrangement without consulting them, they will raise their
eyebrows, and look pityingly at the wife. She will inform them, in a
tone of convinced melancholy, that she has long suspected that she was
of no importance to any one, but that now she knows it for certain. She
will then tell her husband that, as she is no longer allowed to interest
herself in what he does, she has of course no opinion on the matter in
hand, and that, if she had one, she would never think of offering it
when she knows that all interference on her part is always so bitterly
resented. Her husband's temper having exploded in the orthodox marital
manner, she will smile sweetly upon him, and, the butler and footman
having entered with the fish, will implore him, in a voice intended
rather for the servants than for him, to moderate his anger, lest he
should set a bad example. She will then weep silently into her tumbler,
and her friends, after expressing a muttered indignation at the
heartlessness of men, will support her tottering steps from the room. If
her husband should invite one or two of his friends to dinner on a
subsequent occasion, she will amuse herself and madden him by recounting
to them this incident, in which she will figure as a suffering angel,
whose wings have moulted under the neglect and cruel treatment of an
unangelic spouse. If, while her story is in progress, she should observe
her husband writhing, she wi