Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/69

 *scientious, painstaking woman, and her husband is well off, and naterally good-natered and well-meanin'. But when they wuz first married Fidelia made a Molok of him, and burnt incense before him day and night, burnin' up on that altar all her own preferences and desires, all her chances of recreation and rest, all her own ideals, her own loves.

Never tryin' to lift herself up and look abroad into the sunlight, and toiler it out-doors into happiness—no; she jest sot crouched before that altar till her eyes got dim with the smoke of her sacrifice and she couldn't straighten up. And the cloud of incense she wuz offerin' up to him from day to day wuz so heavy between 'em that he'd lost sight of her; and bein' at his feet, instead of by his side where she belonged, he couldn't see her very well, and she seemed to be quite a distance away from him. She had made over by such doin's his naterally generous disposition into a selfish, overbearin' one. He wuz about as innocent as a babe of the way it wuz done, and she, too. But, take it all in all, she had made about the worst botch of married life that I had ever seen made, and she all the time jest as conscientious and religious as old Job or Zekiel or any of 'em; and he, too, thought that he wuz jest as good as Obadiah or Jonah or Enoch. And, what made it seem still worse to me, she wuz bringin' up her girl in the same way.

Elinor wuz goin' on twenty-one, and had a bo, Louis Arnold by name. Her Ma had told me about it the year before, and I had noticed that Elinor looked real rosy and sweet. That wuz in the first days of courtship, and I could see that the spell wuz upon her. The earth wuz glorified; the heavens bent down clost to her; she and Louis wuz a-walkin' through Eden. But the next time