Soon his wife was about as contented as she had ever been in her life.
She hated and despised her husband, but quarreling with him and railing
against him gave her occupation and aim--two valuable assets toward
happiness that she had theretofore lacked. Her living--shelter, food,
clothing enough--was now secure. But the most important factor of all
in her content was the one apparently too trivial to be worthy of
record. From girlhood she could not recall a single day in which she
had not suffered from her feet. And she had been ashamed to say
anything about it--had never let anyone, even her maid, see her feet,
which were about the only unsightly part of her. None had guessed the
cause of her chronic ill-temper until Presbury, that genius for the
little, said within a week of their marriage:

"You talk and act like a woman with chronic corns."

He did not dream of the effect this chance thrust had upon his wife.
For the first time he had really "landed." She concealed her fright
and her shame as best she could and went on quarreling more viciously
than ever. But he presently returned to the attack. Said he:

"Your feet hurt you. I'm sure they do. Now that I think of it, you
walk that way."

"I suppose I deserve my fate," said she. "When a woman marries beneath
her she must expect insult and low conversation."

"You must cure your feet," said he. "I'll not live in the house with a
person who is made fiendish by corns. I think it's only corns. I see
no signs of bunions."

"You brute!" cried his wife, rushing from the room.

But when they met again, he at once resumed the subject, telling her
just how she could cure herself--and he kept on telling her, she
apparently ignoring but secretly acting on his advice. He knew what he
was about, and her feet grew better, grew well--and she was happier
than she had been since girlhood when she began ruining her feet with
tight shoes.

Six months after the marriage, Presbury and his wife were getting on
about as comfortably as it is given to average humanity to get on in
this world of incessant struggle between uncomfortable man and his
uncomfortable environment. But Mildred had become more and more
unhappy. Her mother, sometimes angrily, again reproachfully--and that
was far harder to bear--blamed her for "my miserable marriage to this
low, quarrelsome brute." Presbury let no day pass without telling her
openly that she was a beggar living off him, that she