t the prevailing tone of discontented _ennui_
which pervades this letter.

Apart, moreover, from Sterne's regrets of London, his country home
was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode. His
relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year.
With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished
men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the _role_
of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband's
triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help
herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of
his six months' revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had
been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in
the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving so clearly that
her husband preferred the world's society to hers, she naturally,
perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his.
Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already
brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so
comfortable and so hopeless--secure alike against the risk of "scenes"
and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from
_amantium irae_ against all possibility of _redintegratio amoris._
To such perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both
sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his
conjugal relations in this philosophic strain:

"As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is
easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer
it would have been a burning shame--else she declares herself
happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the
most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense,
built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a
bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe,
and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are
so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit,
though humorous;[2] a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic,
and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you
like the simile?"

There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that
Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her husband's friends was wholly based
upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband;