From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don’t know what to do, on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.

Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes, wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three thousand francs a year.  He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed himself to be so caught!  For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.

It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated nuisance.

“I don’t see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it,” says Caroline.

“The way to get along in the country,” replies a little retired grocer, “is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and then everything changes.”

On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, “What an idea that was of yours, to buy a country house!  The best way to do about the country is to go there on visits to other people.”

Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, “Don’t have a newspaper or a country seat of your own:  there are plenty of idiots who will have them for you.”

“Bah!” returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women’s logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, “you are right:  but then you know the baby is in splendid health, here.”

Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline’s susceptibilities.  A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself.  She is silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country.  Adolphe being absent on business, she waits for him from five o’clock to seven, and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office.  She talks for three-quarters of an hour of her anxieties.  She was afraid to go from the house to the office.  Is it proper for a young woman to be left alone, so?  She cannot support such an existence.

The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which deserves a chapter to itself.

TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.

Axiom.—­There are parentheses in worry.

EXAMPLE—­A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano.  This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife’s timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation.  Every season has its peculiar vexation.