affect to have any. To her neither Tutt nor Mr. Tutt was any such great
shakes. Had Tutt dared to let her know of many of the schemes which he
devised for the profit or safety of his clients she would have thought
less of him still; in fact, she might have parted with him forever. In a
sense Mrs. Tutt was an exacting woman. Though she somewhat reluctantly
consented to view the hours from nine a.m. to five p.m. in her husband's
day as belonging to the law, she emphatically regarded the rest of the
twenty-four hours as belonging to her.

The law may be, as Judge Holmes has called it, "a jealous mistress," but
in the case of Tutt it was not nearly so jealous as his wife. So Tutt
was compelled to walk the straight-and-narrow path whether he liked it
or not. On the whole he liked it well enough, but there were
times--usually in the spring--when without being conscious of what was
the matter with him he mourned his lost youth. For Tutt was only
forty-eight and he had had a grandfather who had lived strenuously to
upward of twice that age. He was vigorous, sprightly, bright-eyed and as
hard as nails, even if somewhat resembling in his contours the late Mr.
Pickwick. Mrs. Tutt was tall, spare, capable and sardonic. She made Tutt
comfortable, but she no longer appealed to his sense of romance. Still
she held him. As the playwright hath said "It isn't good looks they
want, but good nature; if a warm welcome won't hold them, cold cream
won't."

However, Tutt got neither looks nor cold cream. His welcome, in fact,
was warm only if he stayed out too late, and then the later the warmer.
His relationship to his wife was prosaic, respectful. In his heart of
hearts he occasionally thought of her as exceedingly unattractive. In a
word Mrs. Tutt performed her wifely functions in a purely matter-of-fact
way. Anything else would have seemed to her unseemly. She dressed in a
manner that would have been regarded as conservative even on Beacon
Hill. She had no intention of making an old fool of herself or of
letting him be one either. When people had been married thirty years
they could take some things for granted. Few persons therefore had ever
observed Mr. Tutt in the act of caressing Mrs. Tutt; and there were
those who said that he never had. Frankly, she was a trifle forbidding:
superficially not the sort of person to excite a great deal of
sentiment; and occasionally, as we have hinted, in the spring Tutt
yearned for a little sentiment