“Why, Charlie, you sha’n’t talk so about my mother! I won’t allow it.”

“It does sound a little rough, my dear; but I can’t help it. She does exasperate me so. She doesn’t show a proper deference for your husband, my dear. We are married now, and she ought to give up her objections to me. I can’t be expected to place myself in her leading strings.”

“But you mustn’t demand too much at once, and should try to conciliate her. Now do, for my sake; won’t you, dear?”

Here we were, only a month married, and spending our honeymoon at a most charming summer resort, where there was no excuse for getting out of patience. Everything was beautiful and attractive: Little hotel, strange to say, quite delightful; no fault to find with surroundings and accommodations; my darling Bessie, as sweet as an angel and determined to be happy and to make me happy; everything, in short, calculated to give us a long summer of delight.

That is, if Bessie had only been an orphan. But there was her mother, who had joined us on our summer trip, after the first two weeks of unalloyed happiness, and threatened to accompany us through life. Already it almost made the prospect dismal. The idea that Bessie and I would ever quarrel, or even have any impatient words together, had seemed to me to be simply ridiculous. I had seen what I had seen. My dashing friend, Fred, and his stylish wife,—they had been married two years, and a visible coldness had come upon them. I knew, by an occasional angry whisper and knitting of the brow before people, that he must sometimes swear and rave in the privacy of their own rooms, and her cutting replies or haughty indifference showed that there had been a deal of love lost between them in those two years.Other people, too, got indifferent or downright hostile in their marital relations. But then, I was not a dashing fellow and Bessie was not stylish, and in other ways we were quite different from most people. Ours had been a real love-match from the first. Bessie was simple and unaffected, honest and pure in every thought, and determined to make me a faithful and loving wife till death did us part. As for me, why, of course I was generous and affectionate, ready to make any sacrifice and bear any burden for the trusting creature who had so freely given herself into my keeping. There should be no clouds to darken her life. I would never be selfish or impatient, or for one moment hurt her gentle heart by heedless act or careless word.

But plague upon it! I could not get on with her mother; and here I was, before our summer holiday was over, and before we had settled down to that home life in which trouble and annoyance must needs come, getting out of patience and saying cruel things; and there was Bessie, sitting in the summer twilight with a light shawl drawn over her shoulders, pouting her pretty lips with vexation, and digging the toes of her little boots into the balustrade in front of us, because I had expressed a pious wish that her mother was in Jericho. I declare, if there weren’t tears gathering in her gentle blue eyes!

I was angry with myself, and, putting my arm around her slender waist, I laid my cheek against hers and said soothingly, “Never mind, darling! I didn’t mean it. Don’t think any more about it.”

But as we sat for the next five minutes without saying a word, I couldn’t help pondering on the possibilities of the future, for Mrs. Pinkerton was to live with us. That was one of the understood conditions of our bargain, and it was evident that she was to furnish the test of all my good resolutions.

Mrs. Pinkerton had been left a widow when Bessie was twelve years old, with a neat little cottage in the suburbs of the city and a snug competence in a secure investment. I was fairly settled in business, with an income that would enable us to live in modest comfort, and was determined not to disturb the investment or have it drawn upon in any way for household expenses. But the old lady—I already began to speak of her by that disrespectful epithet, although she was still under fifty—was to live with us. I had readily acquiesced in that arrangement, for was it not my darling’s wish? And I could not decently make any objection, for it was mighty convenient to have a pretty cottage, ready furnished, in one of the finest suburbs of the city in which I was employed.

Mrs. Pinkerton was a good woman in her way: how could she be anything else and the mother of such an angel as I had secured for my wife? She meant well, of course; I admitted that, and I ought to be on the pleasantest terms with her, and determined from the first that I would be. But somehow we were not congenial, and when that is the case the best people in the world find it hard to get along agreeably together.

The course of true love between Bessie and me had run very smooth. From the moment my old school-fellow, her brother George, now in Paris studying medicine, had introduced me to her, I had been completely won by her sweet disposition and charming ways, and she in turn was captivated by my manly independence, strong good sense, and generous impulses. I am not vain, but the truth is the truth; and, as I am telling this story myself, I must set down the facts. We fell in love right away, and it was not long before we were mutually convinced that we were made expressly for each other and could never be happy apart.

So it happened that I had to do the courting with the mother. She was the one to be won over, and it was not likely to be an easy task, for I plainly saw that she did not quite approve of me. When I was first introduced to her, she looked at me with her great, steady blue eyes, as if analyzing me to the very boots, and evidently set me down as a somewhat arrogant and self-sufficient young fellow who needed a judicious course of discipline to teach him humility. I was generally self-possessed and had no little confidence in myself, but I confess that I was embarrassed in her presence. She was not at all like Bessie, I thought. She had taught school in her youth, and had learned to command and be obeyed. The late Mr. Pinkerton, I fancied, had found it useless to contend against her authority, and this had increased her disposition to carry things her own way; and her seven years’ widowhood, with its independence and self-reliance, had not prepared her to be submissive to the wishes of others.

Still, she loved her daughter with tender devotion, and her chief anxiety was to have her every wish gratified. Therein was my advantage, for I knew that Bessie, gentle and trusting as she was, would never give me up or allow her life to be happy without the gratification of her first love. So I set to work confidently to make myself agreeable to the widow and win her consent to our marriage.

“You must bring mamma around to approve of it,” Bessie had said, on that ever-to-be-remembered evening, when we were returning from a long drive, and after an hour of sweet confidences she had surrendered herself without reserve to my future keeping. “She is the best mother in the world, and loves me very much, but she is peculiar in some ways, and I am afraid she doesn’t altogether like you. I would not for the world displease her, that is, if I could help it,” she added, glancing up, as much as to say, “It is all settled now forever and forevermore, whatever may befall, but do get my mother to consent to it with a good grace.”