would never take any advice but his own; and while she pitied him, she pitied herself too, greatly. It was in some degree her husband's fault, if the artificial life she had been leading for the past few years had become necessary to her, and in that artificial life abundant means were an essential factor. Abundance was no longer possible. Several times she went all over their pretty house, quietly, moving like a shadow, as though afraid to break the silence which now reigned throughout it. She felt the soft draperies, looked lovingly at the costly nick-nacks, and a sudden remembrance came to her which froze her blood. Long ago, in her childhood, she remembered once when her father had thought himself ruined, and, all at once, comfort disappeared out of the house. She was very young at the time, but she seemed to see again the troubled face of her mother, worried with the small contrivings of a poverty which would try to conceal itself under a false appearance of well-being. The struggle to make ends meet, the miserable meals, the old dresses made over again, and, above all, the melancholy which brooded in moody silence over the house, broken only by the vexatious murmurings of small cares. The amenities of life often followed on the heels of fortune.
"Sitting beside her husband's bed she mused on all these things."
Ruin was now at her door indeed; if not quite ruin, at least privation. Sitting beside her husband's bed, she mused on all these things, and, having a lively imagination, she saw herself in the depths of poverty, alone, abandoned by society and her friends even; for evermore in the close companionship of one sad, unfortunate man, whom fate compelled to idleness, and from whom, little by little, she had become detached, so to speak. She acknowledged this to herself in a whisper. In the early years of their married life she had asked nothing better than to love her husband with all her heart. She brought him her virgin heart, on whose purity no passing maiden's fancy even had ever traced a shadow, and he had not been able to estimate his prize at its full value. He had treated her like a child, a child to be indulged and gratified with toys and sweetmeats, and the gifts had gradually become more precious to her than the affection of the giver.
Karl had been brought up in a world which hardly allows women to enter really into its fold; not from want of affection, but from the conviction that, their education being so different, they are necessarily lacking in point of intellectual contact. From whatever cause, whether a slovenly habit of thought with regard to women, or, perhaps, from a scarcely to be so called contempt, or that monstrously stupid idea that the intellectual man requires a reposeful corresponding inanity on the part of his wife, Karl had never treated Jeanne as a true helpmeet. Jeanne had accepted the place assigned to her, but not without always having indignantly resented it. Drawn irresistibly into the vortex of fashion—and she could find nothing to reproach herself for in having been so drawn; on the contrary, she gloried in it; it was a requisite of her highly-strung, nervous organisation—this resentment rarely ap-
