g and
directing her into a proper state of dressing. He decided about the
harmony of colours and the choice of patterns. She could not buy
even a ribbon without there being some fault found with it, as not
possessing the elements of beauty in just arrangements. In company,
you would often hear him say--"Oh, my wife has no taste. She would
dress like a fright if I did not watch her all the time."

Though outwardly passive or concurrent when such things were said,
Amanda felt them as unjust, and they wounded her more or less
severely, according to the character of the company in which she
happened at the time to be; but her self-satisfied husband saw
nothing of this. And not even when some one, more plainly spoken
than others, would reply to such a remark--"She did not dress like a
fright before you were married," did he perceive his presumption and
his errors.

But passiveness under such a relation does not always permanently
remain; it was accompanied from the first by a sense of oppression
and injustice, though love kept the feeling subdued. The desire for
ruling in any position gains strength by activity. The more the
young wife yielded, the more did the husband assume, until at length
Amanda felt that she had no will of her own, so to speak. The
conviction of this, when it formed itself in her mind, half
involuntarily brought with it an instinctive feeling of resistance.
Here was the forming point of antagonism--the beginning of the state
of unhappiness foreshadowed from the first. Had Amanda asserted her
right to think and act for herself in the early days of her married
life, the jar of discord would have been light. It now promised to
be most afflicting in its character.

The first activity of Amanda's newly forming state showed itself in
the doing of certain things to which she was inclined, notwithstanding
the expression of her husband's disapproval. Accustomed to the most
perfect compliance, Mr. Lane was disturbed by this.

"Oh, dear! what a horrid looking thing!" said he one day, as he
discovered a new dress pattern which his wife had just purchased
lying on a chair. "Where in the world did that come from?"

"I bought it this morning," replied Amanda.

"Take it back, or throw it into the fire," was the husband's rude
response.

"I think it neat," said Amanda, smiling.

"Neat? It's awful! But you've no taste. I wish you'd let me buy your
dresses."

The wife made no answer to this. Lane said a good