xcept when she would have had
Mr. Hayes imagine that she slumbered; but lay beside him, tossing and
tumbling, with hot eyes wide open and heart thumping, and pulse of a
hundred and ten, and heard the heavy hours tolling; and at last the day
came peering, haggard, through the window-curtains, and found her still
wakeful and wretched.

Mrs. Hayes had never been, as we have seen, especially fond of her
lord; but now, as the day made visible to her the sleeping figure and
countenance of that gentleman, she looked at him with a contempt and
loathing such as she had never felt even in all the years of her wedded
life. Mr. Hayes was snoring profoundly: by his bedside, on his ledger,
stood a large greasy tin candlestick, containing a lank tallow-candle,
turned down in the shaft; and in the lower part, his keys, purse, and
tobacco-pipe; his feet were huddled up in his greasy threadbare clothes;
his head and half his sallow face muffled up in a red woollen nightcap;
his beard was of several days' growth; his mouth was wide open, and he
was snoring profoundly: on a more despicable little creature the sun
never shone. And to this sordid wretch was Catherine united for ever.
What a pretty rascal history might be read in yonder greasy day-book,
which never left the miser!--he never read in any other. Of what a
treasure were yonder keys and purse the keepers! not a shilling they
guarded but was picked from the pocket of necessity, plundered from
needy wantonness, or pitilessly squeezed from starvation. "A fool, a
miser, and a coward! Why was I bound to this wretch?" thought Catherine:
"I, who am high-spirited and beautiful (did not HE tell me so?); I
who, born a beggar, have raised myself to competence, and might have
mounted--who knows whither?--if cursed Fortune had not baulked me!"

As Mrs. Cat did not utter these sentiments, but only thought them, we
have a right to clothe her thoughts in the genteelest possible language;
and, to the best of our power, have done so. If the reader examines
Mrs. Hayes's train of reasoning, he will not, we should think, fail
to perceive how ingeniously she managed to fix all the wrong upon her
husband, and yet to twist out some consolatory arguments for her
own vanity. This perverse argumentation we have all of us, no doubt,
employed in our time. How often have we,--we poets, politicians,
philosophers, family-men,--found charming excuses for our own
rascalities in the monstrous wickedness of the wor