They were certainly a very handsome couple. He was a tall, finely formed, stately man, with a Roman profile, brown complexion, dark eyes and jet-black hair and beard. She was a tall, elegant and graceful blonde, with Grecian features, a blooming complexion, dark blue eyes, and rich, sunny, golden-brown hair.
Theirs had evidently been a love match—a real, poetic, romantic, sentimental love match of the oldest-fashioned pattern.
He thought that he had found in her the very pearl, or rose, or star of womanhood—and so even thought many other men, when basking in her smiles, to be sure.
She thought that she had discovered in him the man of men.
In a word, they really adored one another. Each lived only for the other. Each would have suffered or died to save the other a single pang.
Even when, in time, children came to them, though they loved the little ones with more than usual parental affection, yet they loved them less than they loved each other.
Yet, with everything to make them blessed, it was cautiously whispered in the neighborhood that the household of Mondreer was not a happy one; that the beautiful mistress was subject to occasional periods of such profound depression—such intense gloom—as filled her husband’s heart with alarm, and shadowed even her physician’s mind with forebodings that these symptoms indicated the approach of that worst and most hopeless form of mental disease, melancholia.
Her devoted husband often proposed to take her, during the summer, to Saratoga or Newport; or, during the winter, to Washington or to Baltimore; he even urged her at all times to let him take her to Europe. But she firmly objected to leaving Mondreer, insisting that she was happier there than she could be anywhere else.
And, in truth, as years passed on, and children came, her melancholy seemed gradually to wear off, until in time it wholly disappeared.
Three children were born to them—all girls.