r at ten.

"I shall doubtless sup with my husband," she said.

This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally
fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet's several stabs with a
dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the
morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her
hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!

Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the
spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two
tears issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the
slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the
threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred
leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not
be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.

Caroline--pious woman that she was--opened the door violently without
being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and
then hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.

As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in
reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid's finesse:

"Why, madame, your husband's got back!"

"He has only got back to Paris," returned the pious Caroline.

USELESS CARE.

Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes
her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite
pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and
follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and
yet economically--a house, too, not easy to manage--who, from morality
and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no
other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to
express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the
sentiment of her duties_. This underlined circumlocution is the
paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.

Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband
by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel's, that he
was very fond of mushrooms _a l'Italienne_.

If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing
his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upo