agonize his valet. Poverty and its grim comrades made way for a
whole host of petty irritations and peevish complaints; and as no
guest or visitor ever relieved the domestic discontent, or broke on the
domestic bickering, they generally ended in that moody sullenness which
so often finds love a grave in repentance. Nothing makes people tire of
each other like a familiarity that admits of carelessness in quarrelling
and coarseness in complaining. The biting sneer of Welford gave acrimony
to the murmur of his wife; and when once each conceived the other the
injurer, or him or herself the wronged, it was vain to hope that one
would be more wary, or the other more indulgent. They both exacted too
much, and the wife in especial conceded too little. Mrs. Welford was
altogether and emphatically what a libertine calls "a woman,"--such as
a frivolous education makes a woman,--generous in great things, petty
in small; vain, irritable, full of the littleness of herself and her
complaints, ready to plunge into an abyss with her lover, but equally
ready to fret away all love with reproaches when the plunge had been
made. Of all men, Welford could bear this the least. A woman of a
larger heart, a more settled experience, and an intellect capable of
appreciating his character and sounding all his qualities, might have
made him perhaps a useful and a great man, and, at least, her lover for
life. Amidst a harvest of evil feelings the mere strength of his nature
rendered him especially capable of intense feeling and generous emotion.
One who relied on him was safe; one who rebelled against him trusted
only to the caprice of his scorn. Still, however, for two years, love,
though weakening with each hour, fought on in either breast, and could
scarcely be said to be entirely vanquished in the wife, even when she
eloped with her handsome seducer. A French writer has said pithily
enough: "Compare for a moment the apathy of a husband with the
attention, the gallantry, the adoration of a lover, and can you ask the
result?" He was a French writer; but Mrs. Welford had in her temper much
of the Frenchwoman. A suffering patient, young, handsome, well versed
in the arts of intrigue, contrasted with a gloomy husband whom she
had never comprehended, long feared, and had lately doubted if she
disliked,--ah! a much weaker contrast has made many a much better
woman food for the lawyers! Mrs. Welford eloped; but she felt a revived
tenderness for her husba