“White heat!” interjected Mr. Aylett. “He can not last much longer.”
“And all because a pretty girl said him 'Nay!'” pursued the wife.
Mr. Aylett and Mr. Dorrance made characteristic responses in a breath.
“The greater blockhead he!” said one.
The other, “His was never a rightly balanced mind, I suspect. I always thought him weak and impressionable.”
“Are your adjectives synonymous?” asked Mrs. Aylett playfully.
“Generally!”
Her brother had been reading at a distant window, while the daylight sufficed to show him the type of his book. He now laid it by, and came forward into the redder circle of radiance cast by the burning logs. He was in his forty-third year, saturnine of visage, coldly monotonous in accent, a business machine that did its work in good, substantial style, and undertook no “fancy jobs.” He had amassed a handsome fortune, built a handsome house, and married a handsome woman, all of which appendages to his consequence he contemplated with grim complacency. As regarded spiritual likeness, mutual affection, and assimilation of feeling and opinion, he and his wife had receded, the one from the other, in the fourteen years of their wedded life. There had been no decided rupture. Both disliked altercations, and where radical opposition of sentiment existed, they avoided the unsafe ground by tacit consent. Mabel's uniform policy was that of outward submission to the mandates of her chief.
“After all, it makes little difference!” she fell into the habit of saying in the earlier years of matronhood, and he interpreted her listless acquiescence in his decrees as faith in the soundness of his judgment, the infallibility of his decisions. No woman of sense and spirit ever becomes an exemplar in unquestioning obedience to a mortal man, unless through apathy—fatal torpor of mind or heart. Of this fact in moral history our respectable barrister was happily ignorant. He was no better versed in the lore of the heart feminine than when he accepted Mabel Aylett's esteem and friendly regard in lieu of the shy, but ardent attachment a betrothed maiden should have for the one she means to make her husband.
He respected her thoroughly, and loved her better than he did anybody else. She was the one woman he recognized as his sister's superior—supremacy due to the influence of single-minded integrity and modest dignity. What Mabel said, he believed without gainsaying; while Clara's clever dicta required winnowing to separate the probably spurious from the possibly true. If his tone, in addressing his wife, was seldom affectionate, it was never careless, as that which replied to his sister's raillery.