"We can—we must—we will!" she answered, lifting her hidden face from his bosom and turning it up fondly to his. "God helping me, I will be to you a better wife in the future."
"And I a more patient, loving, and forbearing husband," he replied. "Oh that our hearts might beat together as one heart!"
For a little while Irene continued to gaze into her husband's countenance with looks of the tenderest love, and then hid her face on his bosom again.
And thus were they again reconciled.
CHAPTER X.
AFTER THE STORM.
AFTER the storm. And they were reconciled. The clouds rolled back; the sun came out again with his radiant smiles and genial warmth. But was nothing broken? nothing lost? Did each flower in the garden of love lift its head as bravely as before? In every storm of passion something is lost. Anger is a blind fury, who tramples ruthlessly on tenderest and holiest things. Alas for the ruin that waits upon her footsteps!
The day that followed this night of reconciliation had many hours of sober introversion of thought for both Emerson and his wife; hours in which memory reproduced language, conduct and sentiments that could not be dwelt upon without painful misgivings for the future. They understood each other too well to make light account of things said and done, even in anger.
In going over, as Irene did many times, the language used by her husband on the night before, touching their relation as man and wife, and his prerogative, she felt the old spirit of revolt arising. She tried to let her thought fall into his rational presentation of the question involving precedence, and even said to herself that he was right; but pride was strong, and kept lifting itself in her mind. She saw, most clearly, the hardest aspect of the case. It was, in her view, command and obedience. And she knew that submission was, for her, impossible.