and mine is ruined."

"We had a good time."

"Ah, you men, you play and that's the whole of it. Once married, you
care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts."

"How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we
arrived."

"Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you
left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You
are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I
don't know what you are thinking about."

Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give
your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman
of wood: she gives you a "thank you" which puts you in the same rank
as her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do
after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of
going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.

The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with
blunt No's and Yes's, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows
with a slanting glance at you. "Monsieur's always doing these things,"
she mutters.

You alone might have changed Madame's temper. She goes to bed; she has
her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not
comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the
most hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise,
in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the
East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor
Adolphe: you don't exist, you are a bag of wheat.

Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber
where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you
the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not
melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to
be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.
Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland
replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.

Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.

The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the
more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient,
Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.

Axiom.--Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their
strong points, they leave us to guess at th