“You are quite right, my dear,” said Harrie, pausing in her walk up and down, patting and singing to Baby, who stared with open eyes over her shoulder, and obstinately declined going to sleep. “You will turn out a notable woman, I see. It's a curious and melancholy fact, which we don't ever learn till we are married, that all the love in the world is thrown away upon a man unless you make him comfortable at home. A neat house and a creditable dinner every day go more to his heart than all the sentimental devotion you can give. It's all very well for a man in love to live upon roses and posies, and kisses and blisses, but after he is married he dearly likes to be comfortable.”
Agatha was silent for a moment, hardly venturing to believe, and yet afraid she must. “I heard Miss Valery once say that no man's love after marriage is exactly as it was before it; that the thing attained soon loses its preciousness, and that the wife has to assume a new character, and win another kind of love. I wonder if this is true. I wonder”—and suddenly she changed her seriousness for the tone of raillery she always used with Harrie Dugdaie—“I wonder whether our husbands adore us first, and afterwards expect us to adore them.”
“So they do; I assure you they do! And a pretty amount of adoring and waiting upon your husband will require. I wouldn't for the whole universe have my Duke such an awfully exacting, particular, provoking, disagreeably good, or inexplicably naughty animal as my brother Nathanael.”
“Mrs. Dugdaie!” Agatha hardly knew whether to laugh or to be indignant. She only knew that she felt ready to spring up like a chained tigress when anybody said a word against Mr. Harper.
“There now, don't waken the baby. Keep yourself quiet, do. See, there's its husband coming down the street to comfort it. He is looking up here, too. Run down, do'ee now; and if she'll be a good girl she shall have the neatest household and the best husband in Kingcombe—always excepting mine.”
Agatha did not run down; but she leant over the landing, and heard the footsteps and voices in the hall—steps and voices which always seem to put new life into a house where its ruler is dear to the hearts of wife and children. Troubled as she was—laden with even a new weight since the talk with Mrs. Dugdale—Agatha listened, and felt that in spite of all, the house seemed brighter for the entrance of her husband. She tried to catch what he was saying, but only heard the voice of Mr. Dugdaie.
“Of course, as you say, it's necessary. But really tomorrow—so soon—and for such a long time too! Couldn't both go together?”
Nathanael made some inaudible reply.
“To be sure, you know best. But—poor young thing!—I wonder what my Harrie would have said to me. Poor, pretty little thing!”
The words, the manner, startled Agatha; She could not make them out. She descended, looking alarmed, uneasy—a look which did not wear off all the rest of the evening.