sobbed, "--for my very own."

"A second-hand dress! A dress that has been worn!" cried Tom. "How
could you dream of insulting me so? The thing is absolutely impossible.
Why, Letty, just think!--There should I be, going about as if the house
were my own, and there would be my wife in the next room, or perhaps at
my elbow, dressed in the finery of the lady's-maid of the house! It
won't bear thinking of! I declare it makes me so ashamed, as I lie
here, that I feel my face quite hot in the dark! To have to reason
about such a thing--with my own wife, too!"

"It's not finery," sobbed Letty, laying hold of the one fact within her
reach; "it's a beautiful black silk."

"It matters not a straw what it is," persisted Tom, adding humbug to
cruelty. "You would be nothing but a sham!--A live dishonesty! A
jackdaw in peacock's feathers!--I am sorry, Letty, your own sense of
truth and uprightness should not prevent even the passing desire to act
such a lie. Your fine dress would be just a fine fib--yourself would be
but a walking fib. I have been taking too much for granted with you: I
must bring you no more novels. A volume or two of Carlyle is what _you_
want."

This was too much. To lose her novels and her new dress together, and
be threatened with nasty moral medicine--for she had never read a word
of Carlyle beyond his translation of that dream of Richter's, and
imagined him dry as a sand-pit--was bad enough, but to be so reproved
by her husband was more than she could bear. If she was a silly and
ignorant creature, she had the heart of a woman-child; and that
precious thing in the sight of God, wounded and bruised by the husband
in whom lay all her pride, went on beating laboriously for him only.
She did not blame him. Anything was better than that. The dear, simple
soul had a horror of rebuke. It would break hedges and climb stone
walls to get out of the path of judgment--ten times more eagerly if her
husband were the judge. She wept and wailed like a sick child, until at
length the hard heart of selfish Tom was touched, and he sought, after
the fashion of a foolish mother, to read the inconsolable a lesson of
wisdom. But the truer a heart, the harder it is to console with the
false. By and by, however, sleep, the truest of things, did for her
what even the blandishments of her husband could not.

When she woke in the morning, he was gone: he had thought of an
emendation in a poem that had been set up the day before, and