han one or two evenings in the week, while the day was given either to
the arrangement of dress or taking of necessary rest, so that her
husband saw comparatively little of her, except for the moment when she
always came to him with hood and white cloak in hand to ask him how she
looked, before going to the carriage waiting at the door. Never in her
girlish days had she been so beautiful as she was now, but Richard
seldom told her so, though he felt the magic influence of her brilliant
beauty, and did not wonder that she was the reigning belle. He seldom
accompanied her himself. Parties, and receptions, and concerts, were
bores, he said; and at first he had raised objections to her going
without him. But after motherly Mrs. Harris, who boarded in the next
block, and was never happier than when chaperoning someone, offered to
see to her and take her under the same wing which had sheltered six
fine and now well-married daughters, Richard made no further objections.
He did not wish to be thought a domestic tyrant; he did not wish to seem
jealous, and so he would wrap Ethie's cloak around her, and taking her
himself to Mrs. Harris' carriage, would give that lady sundry charges
concerning her, bidding her see that she did not dance till wholly
wearied out, and asking her to bring her home earlier than the previous
night. Then, returning to his solitary rooms, he would sit nursing the
demon which might so easily have been thrust aside. Ethie was not
insensible to his kindness in allowing her to follow the bent of her own
inclinations, even when it was so contrary to his own, and for his sake
she did many things she might not otherwise have done. She snubbed Harry
Clifford and the whole set of dandies like him, so that, though they
danced, and talked, and laughed with her, they never crossed a certain
line of propriety which she had drawn between them. She was very
circumspect; she tried at first in various ways to atone to Richard for
her long absence from him, telling him whatever she thought would
interest him, and sometimes, when she found him waiting for her, and
looking so tired and sleepy, playfully chiding him for sitting up for
her, and telling him that though it was kind in him to do so, she
preferred that he should not. This was early in the season; but after
the day when Mrs. Markham, senior, came over from Olney to spend the
day, and "blow Richard's wife up," as she expressed it, everything was
changed, and Ethelyn