On the saddest part of all,—­silence.  You understand, and I can understand through you.  Do you know, that I never used to dream unless indisposed, and rarely then—­(of late I dream of you, but quite of late)—­and those nightmare dreams have invariably been of one sort.  I stand by (powerless to interpose by a word even) and see the infliction of tyranny on the unresisting man or beast (generally the last)—­and I wake just in time not to die:  let no one try this kind of experiment on me or mine!  Though I have observed that by a felicitous arrangement, the man with the whip puts it into use with an old horse commonly.  I once knew a fine specimen of the boilingly passionate, desperately respectable on the Eastern principle that reverences a madman—­and this fellow, whom it was to be death to oppose, (some bloodvessel was to break)—­he, once at a dinner party at which I was present, insulted his wife (a young pretty simple believer in his awful immunities from the ordinary terms that keep men in order)—­brought the tears into her eyes and sent her from the room ... purely to ‘show off’ in the eyes of his guests ... (all males, law-friends &c., he being a lawyer.) This feat accomplished, he, too, left us with an affectation of compensating relentment, to ’just say a word and return’—­and no sooner was his back to the door than the biggest, stupidest of the company began to remark ’what a fortunate thing it was that Mr. So-and-so had such a submissive wife—­not one of the women who would resist—­that is, attempt to resist—­and so exasperate our gentleman into ...  Heaven only knew what!’ I said it was, in one sense, a fortunate thing; because one of these women, without necessarily being the lion-tressed Bellona, would richly give him his desert, I thought—­’Oh, indeed?’ No—­this man was not to be opposed—­wait, you might, till the fit was over, and then try what kind argument would do—­and so forth to unspeakable nausea.  Presently we went up-stairs—­there sate the wife with dried eyes, and a smile at the tea-table—­and by her, in all the pride of conquest, with her hand in his, our friend—­disposed to be very good-natured of course.  I listened arrectis auribus, and in a minute he said he did not know somebody I mentioned.  I told him, that I easily conceived—­such a person would never condescend to know him, &c., and treated him to every consequence ingenuity could draw from that text—­and at the end marched out of the room; and the valorous man, who had sate like a post, got up, took a candle, followed me to the door, and only said in unfeigned wonder, ’What can have possessed you, my dear B?’—­All which I as much expected beforehand, as that the above mentioned man of the whip keeps quiet in the presence of an ordinary-couraged dog.  All this is quite irrelevant to the case—­indeed, I write to get rid of the thought altogether.  But I do hold it the most stringent duty of all who can, to stop a condition,