If Mrs. Daley flew into a passion on the subject, and declared that she had seldom a place where a guest could be seated, he took up another volume, and perhaps, laid the one he had been reading upon the only vacant chair.
“You are the rudest man in the world, Madison,” was Ariana’s involuntary exclamation, as her learned connection gave her a kind of chin bow when she entered the apartment, without appearing to favor her with a single glance.
“That is what I always tell him,” rejoined Jane, who seemed, as is the case with some one in most families, to have absorbed all the spirit intended amply to endow the whole; “read, read, from morning till night. I might as well have no husband.”
Like the boy under stoical tuition, if Mr. Daley had learned nothing else from philosophy, it had enabled him to meet reproach with perfect calmness. It is questionable, however, if that mode of meeting reproach is a virtue, which instead of turning away wrath, infuriates it beyond all bounds. Mr. Daley’s perfect indifference to the happiness of every living thing, was the alkali to the acid of Mrs. Daley’s character, and produced violent fermentation. How cold those blue eyes of his looked through the green spectacles worn to repair the effect of constant study by lamp-light! It would have been well if the carpet could have been defended from the effects of these nocturnal vigils, as many a spot was visible in spite of the constant wear which had reduced the once elastic Brussels to a floor-cloth consistency.
Home, to the man of science, was only a place where the torch of mind was to be re-lighted; his wife, a being who fed it with oil, and her house the mere laboratory used for those supplies of a physical nature which made the ethereal flame burn purer and brighter.
What a pity it is that all who are destined to play the part of cyphers have not a taste for nonentity! Mrs. Daley, as she often told her husband, who, however, had not once seemed to hear the remark, “never dreamed before her marriage that it would come to this.” To be sure he had been a different man as a lover, but it is one of the standing wonders of the world how the wise and great ever condescended to the foolishness of courting; yet philosophers in love are always lamentably absent, and being quite out of their element, flounder away more boisterously than any other kind of fish, but marriage puts them again at ease, and then their cold blood creeps on uninterrupted in its sluggish course.
“Old maid or not old maid,” again passed through Ariana’s mind as her eyes rested on Mr. Daley’s boots, which, in their turn, rested upon the marble mantelpiece.
“Literary men are I presume all just such bears, and men of business like Andrew.” Single-blessedness would have carried the day had not the most finical of her maiden acquaintance arisen to efface the images of the brothers-in-law.
“Do these old books make you happy, Madison Daley?” she asked, when her sister was quite exhausted with the relation of her grievances. The Professor had been caught looking up at the cessation of the sound of his wife’s tongue, which he seemed to have imagined was to be perpetual.
One cannot pretend to deafness as easily when they meet the eye of a questioner, and a cold “Yes,” fell from the thin lips of the philosopher. He instantly resumed reading a “Treatise upon the promotion of individual happiness, as the only certain way of enhancing national prosperity.”