what society will
think, and say, and write about him; afraid of the petty gossip of the
millions he will never see or hear of. This cowardice it is that checks
him in every aspiration to vindicate his wife's honor and his boy's
birth."

"_Si cela se peut_," said Upton, with a very equivocal smile.

A look of haughty anger, with a flush of crimson on her cheek, was the
only answer she made him.

"I mean that he is really not in a position to prove or disprove
anything. He assumed certain 'levities'--I suppose the word will do--to
mean more than levities; he construed indiscretions into grave faults,
and faults into crimes. But that he did all this without sufficient
reason, or that he now has abundant evidence that he was mistaken, I am
unable to say, nor is it with broken faculties and a wandering intellect
that he can be expected to review the past and deliver judgment on it."

"The whole moral of which is: what a luckless fate is that of a foreign
wife United to an English husband!"

"There is much force in the remark," said Upton, calmly.

"To have her thoughts, and words, and actions submitted to the standard
of a nation whose moral subtleties she could never comprehend; to be
taught that a certain amount of gloom must be mixed up with life,
just as bitters are taken for tonics; that _ennui_ is the sure type of
virtue, and low spirits the healthiest condition of the mind,--these are
her first lessons: no wonder if she find them hard ones.

"To be told that all the harmless familiarities she has seen from her
childhood are dangerous freedoms, all the innocent gayeties of the world
about her are snares and pitfalls, is to make existence little better
than a penal servitude,--this is lesson the second. While, to complete
her education, she is instructed how to assume a censorial rigidity of
manner that would shame a duenna, and a condemnatory tone that assumes
to arraign all the criminals of society, and pass sentence on them. How
amiable she may become in disposition, and how suitable as a companion
by this training, _you_, sir, and your countrymen are best able to
pronounce."

"You rather exaggerate our demerits, my dear Princess," said Upton,
smiling. "We really do _not_ like to be so very odious as you would make
us."

"You are excellent people, with whom no one can live,--that's the whole
of it," said she, with a saucy laugh. "If your friend Lord Glencore had
been satisfied to stay at home and marry on