Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/541

1868.] gave her. Elated to rapture at her success in securing him, she paraded their mutual affection ad nauseam in whatever company they entered; people said, dragged him abroad against his will in order to do this. She was arrayed to-night in a blue poplin, trimmed with ermine; wore all her diamonds and artificial orange-blossoms in her hair. She was voluble as light of head, and her voice had always upon Jessie a peculiar and unpleasant effect, akin to that produced by the touch of some viscid substance. But she was Mrs. Orrin Wyllys. This was the end of his "dream of fair women"—to become the petted henchman of a homely, selfish, arbitrary, silly, and rich wife.

"How can you bear to do that coarse work!" was her next essay. "Why, that is a flannel petticoat, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Does Mr. Fordham ever catch you at that sort of sewing?"

"Sometimes."

"I am astonished he tolerates it! Orrin is so fastidious—has such an exalted appreciation of my refinement that I wouldn't dare let him see me handling such a garment. I think the more careful we are to maintain a certain degree of modest reserve in the presence of our husbands, the more we shrink from all things common and unclean, the better they will love us. I dread lowering myself to the level of a common-place woman in my beloved Orrin's eyes; would keep myself his divinity while I can. But with most married people disenchantment comes with the wane of the honeymoon."

Jessie understood the thrust. She had had others like it from the same source. The narrow soul and heart of the heiress had never let her forgive Mrs. Fordham for having once played in her sight the part of chief favorite upon Orrin's list of belles. He had glossed over the circumstance of his pointed attentions to Miss Kirke, by representing her relations to his cousin; had sworn sounding oaths, more loud than deep, that he had never whispered to her of love—and his wife listened and disbelieved. At any rate the Hamiltonians gave the poorer girl the credit of the conquest, and the knowledge of this was the Banquo of Hester's coronation feast.

"But you and my good cousin Roy are such practical people," pursued the chatterer. "I told Orrin the other day, that I did n't believe your husband kissed you once a week. I should cry my eyes out if mine did not kiss me whenever he went out and came in—not to mention dozens of times besides. However, as my blessed, charitable old love says, people differ wonderfully in temperament. Now, we are so ardent!"

"As you say, diversity of temperament accounts for much that seems singular in action," remarked Jessie, composedly.

There was a strange aching at her heart as she said it. Looking at the flat, flaccid visage of her interlocutor, she would have declared it impossible for her to wound her by this inane twaddle, peppered with weak spite. Yet she had set a nerve ajar.

"If I had a husband," the "matter-of-fact" woman was saying to herself, "his kisses would be things too dear and sacred to be counted over and boasted of to others. If I had a husband! Heaven help me! I have none!"

She knew all the while, nevertheless, that Orrin Wyllys's wife was not surrounded by the atmosphere of chivalrous devotion which encompassed her in the secluded life she led as nominal mistress of Roy Fordham's house. Her deep mourning was a sufficient excuse for declining to enter the gay circle in which