Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/61

 MY WIFE'S ESTHETIC SOUL. 47

��MY WIFE'S .ESTHETIC SOUL.

��BY LUCIA MOSES.

It was the sham wood-box that proved to be the cuhiiinating point of my long extended patience, and forced me into the awful determination to bring my heretofore carefully-guarded family skeleton into the light of day, and before the eyes of what I hope will be a pitying public.

Yes, were I not sure of finding at least one sympathetic soul, I could never thus expose the secrets of my hearth and home ; but there are entangling circumstances that warrant great breaches of various forms of trust. Yet, how little did I dream, when I took upon myself the solemn oath to honor Laura, that the time could ever come when I should be compelled to do otherwise ! But that time is come, and I must bring her iniquides before the world. So, without further preface, let me disclose the dread secret : my wife has an aesthetic soul !

This may seem, to some of my inexperienced and youthful readers, a most desirable thing to have. O, how little do they realize what it involves !

To begin at the beginning, I will say, most emphatically, that when I married Laura, her soul had no yearnings toward the aesthetic or infinite. Indeed, I should never have sworn allegiance to any human being with such an atrocious incumbrance as an eesthetically inclined soul. No, Laura was simply a bright, mentally and physically active, honest, innocently unconventional New England girl; a staunch Methodist, with the usual "academy" education of a country village. After our quiet wedding we settled ourselves in a plain, little house, in one of the many suburbs that our good Boston shelters under her wing, in a " motherly- hen " sort of way. I felt the calm of a great peace brooding over my soul, when, lo ! a change came over all my dreams. Laura began, in the second year of our wedded life, to have aspirations not at all in keeping with her tastes as I had known them. A strange restlessness and discontent seized her. I was much troubled, and carefully studied these strange symptoms, at the same time concealing the fact of my diagnosis from the sufferer. After a week of hard work all the mystery lay revealed to my horror-stricken mind : she was trying to be aesthetic ! The awful truth destroyed with one merciless blow my fondly-cherished hopes, routed my Lares and Penates, and left me the broken- hearted man I now am. The whole scheme of Laura's mental disturbance was only too apparent. She had been subtly poisoned by the "cultivation" miasma, that penetrates even to Boston's most distant suburbs. In a moment of weakness I thought I would say nothing, but enjoy the amusing spectacle of my simple-hearted wife "high-flying" at high art, advanced thought, and all that genuine Boston souls do fly at. I vainly supposed the harmless disease, as it was then, would die soon in so healthy a mind as her's. But oh, how bitterly have I since repented my course. Unchecked in the first light forms, the trouble increased daily, even hourly, in violence, until my once quiet home became an arid waste.

Her aspirations for a "higher soul culture" were first manifested in her endeavors to make her house "a reflex of her mental life," — I quote her own words. This desire, in itself, was eminently worthy ; but since she determined to do it at any cost, the results have been terrible. I do not mean cost in dollars and cents, for I was but a salaried dog, so the poor girl was obliged to study days before she could decide just where her money would show to

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