ng," the round-eyed, overdressed young lady with the strident
soprano voice!

We paid our visit of congratulation in due form; and we really did feel
for Major Fitz-David.

The ordeal of marriage had so changed my gay and gallant admirer
of former times that I hardly knew him again. He had lost all his
pretensions to youth: he had become, hopelessly and undisguisedly, an
old man. Standing behind the chair on which his imperious young wife sat
enthroned, he looked at her submissively between every two words that he
addressed to me, as if he waited for her permission to open his lips
and speak. Whenever she interrupted him--and she did it, over and
over again, without ceremony--he submitted with a senile docility and
admiration, at once absurd and shocking to see.

"Isn't she beautiful?" he said to me (in his wife's hearing!). "What a
figure, and what a voice! You remember her voice? It's a loss, my dear
lady, an irretrievable loss, to the operatic stage! Do you know, when I
think what that grand creature might have done, I sometimes ask myself
if I really had any right to marry her. I feel, upon my honor I feel, as
if I had committed a fraud on the public!"

As for the favored object of this quaint mixture of admiration and
regret, she was pleased to receive me graciously, as an old friend.
While Eustace was talking to the Major, the bride drew me aside out of
their hearing, and explained her motives for marrying, with a candor
which was positively shameless.

"You see we are a large family at home, quite unprovided for!" this
odious young woman whispered in my ear. "It's all very well about my
being a 'Queen of Song' and the rest of it. Lord bless you, I have been
often enough to the opera, and I have learned enough of my music-master,
to know what it takes to make a fine singer. I haven't the patience
to work at it as those foreign women do: a parcel of brazen-faced
Jezebels--I hat e them! No! no! between you and me, it was a great
deal easier to get the money by marrying the old gentleman. Here I am,
provided for--and there's all my family provided for, too--and nothing
to do but to spend the money. I am fond of my family; I'm a good
daughter and sister--_I_ am! See how I'm dressed; look at the furniture:
I haven't played my cards badly, have I? It's a great advantage to marry
an old man--you can twist him round your little finger. Happy? Oh, yes!
I'm quite happy; and I hope you are, too. Where are you living now