Mrs. Openshaw’s Christian-name was Alice, and her first husband had been her own cousin.  She was the orphan niece of a sea-captain in Liverpool:  a quiet, grave little creature, of great personal attraction when she was fifteen or sixteen, with regular features and a blooming complexion.  But she was very shy, and believed herself to be very stupid and awkward; and was frequently scolded by her aunt, her own uncle’s second wife.  So when her cousin, Frank Wilson, came home from a long absence at sea, and first was kind and protective to her; secondly, attentive and thirdly, desperately in love with her, she hardly knew how to be grateful enough to him.  It is true she would have preferred his remaining in the first or second stages of behaviour; for his violent love puzzled and frightened her.  Her uncle neither helped nor hindered the love affair though it was going on under his own eyes.  Frank’s step-mother had such a variable temper, that there was no knowing whether what she liked one day she would like the next, or not.  At length she went to such extremes of crossness, that Alice was only too glad to shut her eyes and rush blindly at the chance of escape from domestic tyranny offered her by a marriage with her cousin; and, liking him better than any one in the world except her uncle (who was at this time at sea) she went off one morning and was married to him; her only bridesmaid being the housemaid at her aunt’s.  The consequence was, that Frank and his wife went into lodgings, and Mrs. Wilson refused to see them, and turned away Norah, the warm-hearted housemaid; whom they accordingly took into their service.  When Captain Wilson returned from his voyage, he was very cordial with the young couple, and spent many an evening at their lodgings; smoking his pipe, and sipping his grog; but he told them that, for quietness’ sake, he could not ask them to his own house; for his wife was bitter against them.  They were not very unhappy about this.

The seed of future unhappiness lay rather in Frank’s vehement, passionate disposition; which led him to resent his wife’s shyness and want of demonstration as failures in conjugal duty.  He was already tormenting himself, and her too, in a slighter degree, by apprehensions and imaginations of what might befall her during his approaching absence at sea.  At last he went to his father and urged him to insist upon Alice’s being once more received under his roof; the more especially as there was now a prospect of her confinement while her husband was away on his voyage.  Captain Wilson was, as he himself expressed it, “breaking up,” and unwilling to undergo the excitement of a scene; yet he felt that what his son said was true.  So he went to his wife.  And before Frank went to sea, he had the comfort of seeing his wife installed in her old little garret in his father’s house.  To have placed her in the one best spare room was a step beyond Mrs. Wilson’s powers of submission or generosity.