om her infancy, she had been surrounded with
servants, who lived only to study her caprices; the idea that they had
either feelings or rights had never dawned upon her, even in distant
perspective. Her father, whose only child she had been, had never denied
her anything that lay within the compass of human possibility; and when
she entered life, beautiful, accomplished, and an heiress, she had, of
course, all the eligibles and non-eligibles of the other sex sighing at
her feet, and she had no doubt that Augustine was a most fortunate man
in having obtained her. It is a great mistake to suppose that a woman
with no heart will be an easy creditor in the exchange of affection.
There is not on earth a more merciless exactor of love from others than
a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more unlovely she grows, the more
jealously and scrupulously she exacts love, to the uttermost farthing.
When, therefore, St. Clare began to drop off those gallantries and small
attentions which flowed at first through the habitude of courtship, he
found his sultana no way ready to resign her slave; there were abundance
of tears, poutings, and small tempests, there were discontents, pinings,
upbraidings. St. Clare was good-natured and self-indulgent, and sought
to buy off with presents and flatteries; and when Marie became mother to
a beautiful daughter, he really felt awakened, for a time, to something
like tenderness.

St. Clare's mother had been a woman of uncommon elevation and purity of
character, and he gave to his child his mother's name, fondly fancying
that she would prove a reproduction of her image. The thing had been
remarked with petulant jealousy by his wife, and she regarded her
husband's absorbing devotion to the child with suspicion and dislike;
all that was given to her seemed so much taken from herself. From the
time of the birth of this child, her health gradually sunk. A life of
constant inaction, bodily and mental,--the friction of ceaseless ennui
and discontent, united to the ordinary weakness which attended the
period of maternity,--in course of a few years changed the blooming
young belle into a yellow faded, sickly woman, whose time was divided
among a variety of fanciful diseases, and who considered herself, in
every sense, the most ill-used and suffering person in existence.

There was no end of her various complaints; but her principal forte
appeared to lie in sick-headache, which sometimes would confine her to
her