Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/186

 178 THE WIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Married they were, however, after much difficulty and delay, owing to the impossibility of Caiiyle's arranging the necessary details as anybody else would have done. Miss Welsh had to instruct him in regard to each detail of the ceremony. Her last letter before the wedding, relating to something about the banns which he did not understand, is headed : " The last Speech and marrying Words of that unfortu- nate young woman, Jane Baillie Welsh." An unfortunate young woman, her friends indeed con- sidered her to be, knowing as they did her husband's irascible temper and fantastic whims. Nor, bravely as she faced the future, did she herself expect other happi- ness than was to be won by a life of self-sacrifice, nor ask other reward than the appreciation and confidence of the man of genius whom she had resolved to serve. Having these, she had been well content to bear his irritability and moroseness, to stand between him and poverty's daily worries, to accept menial duties to which she was unaccus- tomed, and to lose the friends whose society he would not tolerate. The first eighteen months of their married life, Carlyle was accustomed to look back upon as the happiest period of his existence. " For my wife," he wrote to his mother shortly after taking possession of his new home, Comely Bank, " I may say in my heart that she is far better than any wife, and loves me with a devotedness which it is a mystery to me how I have ever deserved. She is gay and happy as a lark, and looks with such soft cheerfulness into my gloomy countenance, that new hope passed into me every time I met her eye." She, too, was most happy. " My husband is so kind," she writes in a postscript to one of his letters home, " so in all respects after my own heart. I was sick one day,