And better days, in one sense, Mrs. Vavasour has seen.  I am afraid, indeed, that she has more than once regretted the morning when she ran away in a hack-cab from her brother Lord Scoutbush’s house in Eaton Square, to be married to Elsley Vavasour, the gifted author of “A Soul’s Agonies and other Poems.”  He was a lion then, with foolish women running after him, and turning his head once and for all; and Lucia St. Just was a wild Irish girl, new to London society, all feeling and romance, and literally all; for there was little real intellect underlying her passionate sensibility.  So when the sensibility burnt itself out, as it generally does; and when children, and the weak health which comes with them, and the cares of a household, and money difficulties were absorbing her little powers, Elsley Vavasour began to fancy that his wife was a very commonplace person, who was fast losing even her good looks and her good temper.  So, on the whole, they were not happy.  Elsley was an affectionate man, and honourable to a fantastic nicety; but he was vain, capricious, over-sensitive, craving for admiration and distinction; and it was not enough for him that his wife loved him, and bore him children, kept his accounts, mended and moiled all day long for him and his; he wanted her to act the public for him exactly when he was hungry for praise; and that not the actual, but an altogether ideal, public; to worship him as a deity, “live for him and him alone,” “realise” his poetic dreams of marriage bliss, and talk sentiment with him, or listen to him talking sentiment to her, when she would much sooner be safe in bed burying all the petty cares of the day, and the pain in her back too, poor thing! in sound sleep; and so it befell that they often quarrelled and wrangled, and that they were quarrelling and wrangling this very night.

Who cares to know how it began?  Who cares to hear how it went on,—­the stupid, aimless skirmish of bitter words, between two people who had forgotten themselves?  I believe it began with Elsley’s being vexed at her springing up two or three times, fancying that she heard the children cry, while he wanted to be quiet, and sentimentalise over the roaring of the wind outside.  Then—­she thought of nothing but those children.  Why did she not take a book and occupy her mind?  To which she had her pert, though just answer, about her mind having quite enough to do to keep clothes on the children’s backs, and so forth,—­let who list imagine the miserable little squabble;—­till she says,—­“I know what has put you out so to-night; nothing but the news of my sister’s coming.”  He answers,—­“That her sister is as little to him as to any man; as welcome to come now as she has been to stay away these three years.”

“Ah, it’s very well to say that; but you have been a different person ever since that letter came.”  And so she torments him into an angry self-justification (which she takes triumphantly as a confession) that “it is very disagreeable to have his thoughts broken in on by one who has no sympathy with him and his pursuits—­and who” and at that point he wisely stops short, for he was going to throw down a very ugly gage of battle.