’I am taking nobody’s part. You wrong
your wife, and you especially wrong Miss Rowley.’
‘If you please, Stanbury, we will say nothing
more about it.’ This Trevelyan said holding
the door of the room half open in his hand, so that
the other was obliged to pass out through it.
‘Good evening,’ said Stanbury, with much
anger.
‘Good evening,’ said Trevelyan, with an
assumption of indifference.
Stanbury went away in absolute wrath, though the trouble
which he had had in the interview was much less than
he had anticipated, and the result quite as favourable.
He had known that no good would come of his visit.
And yet he was now full of anger against Trevelyan,
and had become a partisan in the matter which was exactly
that which he had resolutely determined that he would
not become. ’I believe that no woman on
earth could live with him,’ he said to himself
as he walked away. ’It was always the same
with him—a desire for mastery, which he
did not know how to use when he had obtained it.
If it were Nora, instead of the other sister, he would
break her sweet heart within a month.’
Trevelyan dined at his club, and hardly spoke a word
to any one during the evening. At about eleven
he started to walk home, but went by no means straight
thither, taking a long turn through St. James’s
Park, and by Pimlico. It was necessary that he
should make up his mind as to what he would do.
He had sternly refused the interference of a friend,
and he must be prepared to act on his own responsibility.
He knew well that he could not begin again with his
wife on the next day as though nothing had happened.
Stanbury’s visit to him, if it had done nothing
else, had made this impossible. He determined
that he would not go to her room to-night, but would
see her as early as possible in the morning and would
then talk to her with all the wisdom of which he was
master.
How many husbands have come to the same resolution;
and how few of them have found the words of wisdom
to be efficacious!
HARD WORDS
It is to be feared that men in general do not regret
as they should do any temporary ill-feeling, or irritating
jealousy between husbands and wives, of which they
themselves have been the cause. The author is
not speaking now of actual love-makings, of intrigues
and devilish villany, either perpetrated or imagined;
but rather of those passing gusts of short-lived and
unfounded suspicion to which, as to other accidents,
very well-regulated families may occasionally be liable.
When such suspicion rises in the bosom of a wife,
some woman intervening or being believed to intervene
between her and the man who is her own, that woman
who has intervened or been supposed to intervene, will
either glory in her position or bewail it bitterly,
according to the circumstances of the case. We
will charitably suppose that, in a great majority
