had ever been so savage as to call me plain
"Lulie," I should have felt certain he was sick and tired of me, and was
repenting of having married me instead of that spectacled bas-bleu, Miss
Minerva Henshaw, who read Buckle and talked dictionary. I believe I was
intoxicated with my own happiness, and was a little nonsensical because I
was so happy.

Fortunately for the comfort of both Charlie and myself, his domestic
cabinet consisted of a marvelously well-trained set of servants, who were
simply perfect--as perfect in their way as Charlie was in his. They had
been trained by Charlie's mother, who had been the head of affairs in his
house up to the hour of her death--an event which had occurred some dozen
years before my first meeting with Charlie. Everybody said she had been a
celebrated housekeeper, and Charlie's devotion to her had been the talk of
the country-side. There were people malicious enough to say that if
Charlie's mother had never died, he would never have married, but I take
the liberty of resenting such an assertion as a personal insult; for,
although I don't doubt the dear old lady was a perfect jewel in her way,
yet, looking at the portrait of her which hangs over our parlor
mantelpiece, I see the face of a hard, determined-looking woman with cold
gray eyes and rigidly set mouth, in a funny-looking black dress, neither
high-necked nor low-necked, having a starchy white ruffle round the edge,
in vivid white contrast to the yellow skin; with grizzly, iron-gray curls
peeping out from under a cap that is fearfully and wonderfully made, with
a huge ruffled border radiating in a circumference of several feet, while
its two black-and-white gauze ribbon strings lie in rigid exactness over
her two rigidly exact shoulders. Looking on this portrait, I do not thank
anybody for saying that it was only because death chose that shining mark
that I had found favor in Charlie's eyes.

We had been married, I suppose, about six months, when, sitting one
evening over a cozy wood-fire in our cozy little parlor, just under the
work of art I have described at such length, Charlie committed his first
matrimonial solecism. He yawned, actually gaped--an open-mouthed, audible,
undeniable yawn!

Glancing up at him from my work (which consisted of the inevitable worked
slippers without which no woman considers her wifehood absolutely
asserted), I caught him in the act. "Are you tired, Charlie?" I asked in
accents of wifely anxiet