“Well, all I know is, other people can have good tea, and I should think we might.”
And again at dinner:—
“My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is always overdone.”
“Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just right.”
“Well, almost always.”
“Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It’s very difficult to get things done with such a girl.”
“My mother’s things were always well done, no matter what her girl was.”
Again: “My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal. I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size”; or, “My dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?” or, “My dear, I shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be regular”; or, “My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are ironed,—it is perfectly scandalous”; or, “My dear, you must not let Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor”; or, “My dear, you must stop the children from playing in the garret”, or, “My dear, you must see that Maggie doesn’t leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the front hall”; and so on, up stairs and down stairs, in the lady’s chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, “my dear” is to see that nothing goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.
Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears, and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than ever,—and perhaps he does. The only difficulty is that she has passed out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it at the moment. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticise and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic ménage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.
Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved, not provoked,—who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.