Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/166

158 Half an hour passed. Mrs. Saltren remained for some minutes seated where she had been, consoling herself with the reflection that she had named no names; and that, if mischief came of this, the fact would attach to Saltren, not to her. A little while ago we said that love was blind, hymeneal love most blind; but blind with incurable ophthalmia, blindest of all blindness, is self-love.

Mrs. Saltren rose and went about her domestic affairs.

"No one can charge me," said she, "with having kept my house untidy, or with having left unmended my husband's clothes. To think of the cartloads of buttons I've put on during my married life! It is enough to convince any but the envious. Well, it is a comfort that Stephen has been brought to his senses at last, and come to view matters in a proper light. I've heard James say that there is a nerve goes from each eyeball into the brain, and afore they enter it they take a twist about each other, and, so coupled, march in together. And James said if it were not so we should see double, and neither eye would agree with the other. I mind quite well that he said this one day when I was complaining to him that Stephen and I didn't get on quite right together. He said we'd get our twist one day and then see all alike. What he said is come true; leastways, the proper twist has come in Stephen. Thank God, I always see straight."

She went to a corner cupboard and opened it.

"Now that Stephen is gone," she said, "I'll rinse out the glass James had for his gin-and-water. Saltren is that crazy on teetotalism that he would be angry if he knew I had given James any, and angry to think I kept spirits in the house; and because he is so stupid I'm obliged to put it in a medicine-bottle with 'For outward application only' on it, and say it is a lotion for neuralgia. It is a mercy that I named no names, so my conscience is clear. It is just as in Egypt, when there was darkness over all the land, the