Why my sister married John Gray, I never could understand.  I was twenty-two and she was eighteen when the marriage took place.  They had known each other just one year.  He had been passionately in love with her from the first day of their meeting.  She had come more slowly to loving him:  but love him she did, with a love of such depth and fervor as are rarely seen.  He was her equal in nothing except position and wealth.  He had a singular mixture of faults of opposite temperaments.  He had the reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man, side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and sentimentalism of the most sanguine-nervous type.  There is great charm in such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature.  My sister was earnest, wise, resolute.  John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd, vacillating.  My sister was exact, methodical, ready.  John Gray was careless, spasmodic, dilatory.  My sister had affection.  He had tenderness.  She was religious of soul; he had a sort of transcendental perceptivity, so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts of religion than to its obligations.  My sister would have gone to the stake rather than tell a lie.  He would tell a lie unhesitatingly, rather than give anybody pain.  My sister lived earnestly, fully, actively, in each moment of the present.  It never seemed quite clear whether he were thinking of to-day, yesterday, or to-morrow.  She was upright because she could not help it.  He was upright,—­when he was upright,—­because of custom, taste, and the fitness of things.  What fatal discrepancies! what hopeless lack of real moral strength, enduring purpose, or principle in such a nature as John Gray’s!  When I said these things to my sister, she answered always, with a quiet smile, “I love him.”  She neither admitted nor denied my accusations.  The strongest expression she ever used, the one which came nearest to being an indignant repelling of what I had said, was one day, when I exclaimed:—­

“Ellen, I would die before I’d risk my happiness in the keeping of such a man.”

“My happiness is already in his keeping,” said she in a steady voice, “and I believe his is in mine.  He is to be my husband and not yours, dear; you do not know him as I do.  You do not understand him.”

But it is not to give an analysis of her character or of his, nor to give a narrative of their family history, that I write this tale.  It is only one episode of their life that I shall try to reproduce here, and I do it because I believe that its lesson is of priceless worth to women.