Before and since the day when a certain man—idling while Israel and Syria warred—drew a bow at a venture (the margin has it, “in his simplicity,”) that let a king’s life out, the air has vibrated to the twang of other bowstrings, and millions of barbs, as idly sent, have been dyed with life-blood.

In every 50,000 cases of this sort of manslaughter, 49,999 fall by the tongue.

The Hon. Simeon Barton, radiating prosperity from every pore of his snug person, and clothed with complacency as with a garment, rolled about the soon-to-be-vacated bachelor quarters of his nephew-namesake, thumbs in armholes, and chin in air, while he discoursed:

“You’re a pluckier fellow than your uncle, me boy! Of course, it is on the cards that your head may be level. There are literary women and literary women, no doubt, and this must be a favorable specimen of the tribe, or you wouldn’t have been in your present fix, but none of the lot in mine, if you please. When my turn comes—and I aint sure that I shan’t look out for a match some day, when I am too stiff to trot well in single harness, I shall hold the reins. No inside seat for me.”

The nephew laughed in a hearty, whole-souled way. He was not touched yet.

“You mix your figures as you do your cobblers—after you get hold of the sherry bottle—with a swing. Wait until you see my ‘match.’ She is a glorious woman, Uncle Sim. The wonder is that she ever got her eyes down to my level.”

The forty-year-old celibate continued to roll and harangue. His dress coat was new and a close fit to his rotund dapperness; with one lavender glove he smote the palm of his gloved left hand; the rose in his buttonhole was paler than the hard red spots on cheeks like underglazed pottery for smoothness and polish, his mustache curled upward and wriggled at animated periods.

“Quite the thing, me dear boy, altogether proper. For me part, I wouldn’t care to be under obligations to a woman when she had worked down to my level, but tastes differ, and a man of twenty-six who has a living to make ought to cast an anchor to windward, in case of squalls. A woman who can chop a stick, at a pinch, to set the pot to boiling is a convenience. Literature’s a better trade now than it used to be, I suppose. Jones of Illinois was telling me last night of the prices paid to good selling authors, and by George! I was surprised. All the same, I’d fight shy of the Guild if I were contemplating matrimony. If you could see some of the many objects that hang about the Capitol in wait for Tom, Dick, or Harry to pick up a ‘personal,’ or lobby a bill, or get subscriptions to a book or magazine, you wouldn’t wonder at my ‘prejudice,’ as you are pleased to style it. Pah!”

To rid his mouth of the taste he caught up a tumbler of sherry cobbler, filmy without and icy amber within, and drained it.

The expectant bridegroom glanced at the clock. His best man was to call for him at a quarter-past seven. It was exactly seven now, and the minutes drove heavily.

“But Uncle Sim,”—still good-humoredly,—“Miss Welles is not a newspaper reporter, nor a lobbyist, nor yet a penny-a-liner. She wrote to please herself and her friends until her father’s death, six years ago. He was considered fairly wealthy, but something went wrong somewhere, and his widow would have suffered for the want of much to which she had been accustomed but for the talents and courage of her young daughter. I am afraid the poor girl worked harder than her mother suspected for a while, although the public received her favorably from the outset. Mrs. Welles survived her husband three years. Agnes then went to live with her only sister, Mrs. Ryder, the wife of my partner. I first met her at his house. She has continued to write and has supported herself handsomely in this way. She is as heroic as she is sweet—a thorough woman.”

“With a masculine intellect! I comprehend, me boy. Don’t multiply epithets on my account. As I’ve said, I don’t presume to question the wisdom of your choice in this particular case, and that your inamorata is the best of her kind, but personally, I don’t take to the kind. By Jupiter! I was telling Jones of Illinois, last night, of an incident that gave me a ‘scunner’ against woman authors, twenty years ago. Mrs. Shenstone of New York was a literary light in her day. There’s a fashion in writers, as in everything else, and she went out with balloon skirts and chig-nongs. But she was a star of the first magnitude in her own opinion, and, at any rate, something in the stellar line in others’ eyes. Her husband had money and she was a poor girl when she married him. They say he made a show of holding his own while the shekels lasted. A more meek-spirited atomy I never beheld than when they called upon my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamar from Charleston, then staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, one evening, when I chanced to be sitting with the Lamars in their private parlor. And as sure as I am a sinner and you’re another, the card brought in to Mrs. Lamar was ‘Mrs. Cordelia Shenstone and husband.’ The last two words were added in pencil. Fact, ’pon honor! Mrs. Lamar carried the card home and had it framed as a domestic and literary curiosity.”

“You cite an extreme case”—another glance at the slow clock. “If that woman had been a shopkeeper, or a dressmaker, with the same arbitrary, selfish spirit, she would have been guilty of the same gross violation of taste and feeling.”

“Maybe so! maybe so! But the writing woman is a prickly problem in modern society. She is leading the van in all revolutionary rot about women’s wrongs and women’s rights. The party can’t do without her, for the rank and file couldn’t draft a resolution or write a report to save their lives, and they’ve flattered up our blue-stocking until she steps out of all bounds. It makes a conservative patriot’s blood run cold to think what the upshot of it all is to be. And I confess I don’t like to anticipate seeing your cards engraved—‘Mrs. Clytemnestra Ashe and husband.’”

A dark red torrent poured over the listener’s face. Physically and morally, he was thin-skinned.

“There is nothing of the Clytemnestra in her make-up, sir. No woman ever made could rule me, were she my wife. Agnes is too gentle and too sensible to attempt it. As to the cards!” He went to a drawer and took out a bit of pasteboard which he tossed to his kinsman, with a derisive laugh. “That is all settled, you see. Come in!” to a knock at the door.

When the tardy best man appeared, the Hon. Simeon Barton, his head on one shoulder, and eyes half shut, after the manner of an impudent cock-sparrow, was scanning the engraved inscription,

“Leave the ‘Simeon’ out, do you? Clytem—Agnes doesn’t like it, maybe?” And without waiting for a reply—“Good-evening, Mr. White. I’m just advising Bart here to use up this batch of cards plaguey quick, to make room for ‘Mrs. Ashe and husband.’”

Mr. White laughed a little and politely. The jest was in miserable taste, but much was pardonable in rich uncles who were self-made men, when they showed a disposition to help make their nephews. A glimmer of like reasoning may have entered Barton’s mind, for he turned an unshadowed brow to the eccentric millionaire.

“When that time comes I shall employ you to draw up the articles of separation. White, here, is witness to the agreement.”

An hour later, he would not have believed the words had passed his lips. Jest upon such a horror would have seemed profanation to the newly made husband. As the woman who would never again answer to the name of Agnes Welles stood beside him, his were not the only eyes that paid silent homage to her strange beauty—strange, because to the guests, and to the assembled relatives, this phase of one whom most people had hitherto thought only “interesting” and “pleasing,” was new and unexpected. She was but a few inches shorter than her manly partner, and slender to fragility. Straight and supple as a willow-wand, she was ethereal in grace when clad in the misty robes and veil which were the wedding gift of her godmother. Her dark eyes were full of living light, illumining the colorless face into weird loveliness, that belonged neither to feature nor complexion. The short, tense bow of the upper lip, the fine spirited line of the nostrils, the perfect oval of cheek and chin, were always high-bred—some said, haughty. To-night they were chastened into lofty sweetness that was pure womanly.

“She might pass for twenty-two,” said an audaciously young dÉbutante to a crony just behind Mr. Barton.

And—“By George!” thought that astute individual—“the young dog never hinted that his divinity was six years his senior. I should have been surer than ever of receiving that card. Pity! pity! pity! That’s a fault that won’t mend with time.”

Agnes knew better than he could have told her what risks the woman takes who consents to marry her junior in years. Early in their acquaintanceship she had contrived to apprise Barton of this disparity. When he declared his love she set it boldly in the foreground of hesitation and demur.

“When you are thirty-five, in man’s proudest prime and yet far from the comb of the hill, I shall have begun to go down the other side,” she urged. “You might be able to contemplate the contrast boldly, but could I forgive myself? There may be a suspicion of poetry—pathetic but real—in the idea of an old man’s darling, but an old woman’s pet! that is a theme no painter or poet has dared to handle. The suggestion of grotesqueness is inevitable. Both are to be pitied, but I think the wife needs compassion even more than the man she has made ridiculous.”

The rising young lawyer was a clever advocate, and he had never striven longer and harder to win a cause. When his triumph was secured Agnes could not quite dismiss the subject. It haunted her like a wan ghost, with threatening beck and ominous eye. Once, but a month before their wedding day, they were speaking of George Eliot’s singular marriage with a man young enough to be her son, and an abrupt change fell upon Agnes’ visage—a shade of painful doubt and misgiving.

“Dinah Maria Mulock, too!” she exclaimed. “And Mme. de StaËl! Elizabeth Browning’s husband was some months younger than she. Then, there are Mrs. —— and Mrs. ——” naming two prominent living American authors. “How very singular! There must be some occult reason for what we cannot set down as coincidences. It looks like fatality—or” hesitatingly—“infatuation.”

“Rather,” said Barton in gentle seriousness, for her perturbation was too real for playful rallying—“attribute such cases to the truth of the eternal youthfulness of genius. These men see in the faces and forms of the women they woo, the beautiful minds that will never know age or change. Time salutes, instead of challenging those high in favor with the king.”

“Do you know,” Agnes said, her slim white hand threading the brown curls of the head she thought more beautiful than that of Antinous—“that you will never say a more graceful thing than that? You are more truly a poet than I. Don’t disclaim, for I am not a bard at all. When I drop into poetry À la Wegg, it is not ‘in the light of a friend.’ When I am in the dark or at best in a half-light, sorry or weary, or lonely of heart, my thoughts take rhythmic shape. They are only homely little crickets, creeping out in the twilight to sing by the fire that is beginning to gather ashes. I am a born story-teller, but I deserve no credit for that. Something within me that is not myself tells the stories so fast that I can hardly write them down as they are made. I am no genius, dear. Don’t marry me with that impression. I wish for your sake that I were. How gloriously proud you would be of me!”

“I am ‘gloriously proud’ of you now!” He said it in fervent sincerity. “If you have genius, don’t develop it. I can hardly keep you in sight as it is.”

Dimly and queerly, the feeling that prompted the half-laughing protest returned upon him to-night. The solemn radiance overflooding her eyes and clearing into exalted beauty lineaments critics pronounced irregular, positively awed him—an uncommon and not altogether agreeable sensation for a bridegroom, especially one of his practical and somewhat dogmatic cast of mind. Rebel though romantic lovers may at what they consider derogatory to the constancy and depth of wedded affection, it is not to be denied that the turn of the bridal pair from the altar symbolizes a reversal in their mutual relation. The bonds that have held the lover in vassalage—very sweet bondage, perhaps, but still not liberty—are with the utterance of the nuptial benediction transferred to the woman he holds by the hand. Barton Ashe was very much in love, but he was a very man. His wife was now his property.

“I feel a wild desire to put my arms around you to keep your wings from unfurling,” he found occasion to whisper presently. “I suppose these people would think me insane if I were to yield to the impulse and tell them why I did it.”

The luminous eyes laughed joyously into his. With all her intellect and passionate depth of feeling, she had seasons of childlike glee that became her rarely.

“As you would be. I was never farther from ‘wanting to be an angel’ than at this instant. The life that now is appears to me eminently satisfactory.”

A fresh bevy of congratulatory guests interrupted the hasty “aside.”

“We find it hard to forgive you, Mr. Ashe,” twittered an overdressed, overcolored, and overmannered spinster. “How can you reconcile it to your conscience to change a broad, beneficent river into a canal to serve your own particular mill? I shall not congratulate you upon a private good which is a public disaster.”

“Many others are thinking the same thing, but they cannot express it so beautifully,” said a plaintive matron, one of the many whose perfunctory sighs at weddings are the reverse of complimentary to their bonded partners. “But we must be thankful you have been spared so long to make us happy and do so much good in the world.”

“I am puzzled,” Barton observed, looking from one to the other. “If I were taking her out of town, to Coromandel, we will say, or even to New Jersey, there might be occasion for outcry.”

“You are robbing us of the better part of this woman,” interrupted the hortatory spinster in a dramatic contralto. “My protest is in the name of those to whom she belonged by the right the benefited have to the benefactor, before you crossed her path, in an evil hour for the world. It passes my comprehension, and I know much of the arrogant vanity of your sex, how any one man can hope to make up to his author wife for the audience she resigns when she sits down to pour out his coffee and darn his socks for the rest of her mortal existence. It is breaking stones with a gold mallet to make a mere housekeeper out of such material as this,” lightly touching the head crowned by the bridal veil. “But my imagination is not of the masculine gender.”

“Don’t strain it needlessly,” smiled Agnes, before the attacked person summoned wit for a retort. “Soup-making is a finer art than writing essays, to my comprehension, yet I hope to learn it.”

The matron put in her sentence, sandwiched between sighs.

“You will find the two incompatible. Once married, a woman’s life is merged in that of another. She has no volition, no thought, no name of her own.”

“The married woman does not possess herself!” cried the spinster in shrill volubility. “She effaces her individuality in uttering the promise to ‘serve and obey’—vile words that belong rather to the harem of the sixteenth century than to the home of the nineteenth. Somebody else has reported me in yesterday’s World and Herald, so I may as well tell you that I brought forward a motion in Sorosis last Monday, that the club should wear crape upon the left arm for thirty days, dating from this evening, in affectionate memory of one of our youngest and most brilliant members. Talk of the self-immolation of the Jesuit who changes the name his mother gave him and resigns the right of private judgment and personal desire in joining the Order! He is riotously free by comparison with the model wife. Her assumption of the conventual veil is mournfully symbolical.”

Another wave of newcomers swept her onward, still hortatory and gesticulatory.

She was never spoken of again by the bridal pair until the marriage day was a fortnight old.

They were pacing the wooden esplanade in front of the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point Comfort, basking in the December sunshine. The sea air had set roses in Agnes’ cheeks; her lips were full and red, her eye sparkled with soft content, and her step was elastic. Barton, surveying these changes with the undisguised satisfaction of a man who has secured legally the right to exhibit his prize, took his cigar from his mouth to say carelessly:

“By the way, I have never asked the name of the painted-and-powdered party who gave a parlor lecture upon Jesuits and harems the night we were married.”

“It was Miss Marvel,” said Agnes, laughing. “She is an eccentric woman, and as I need not tell you, indiscreet and flippant in talk, letting her theories and spirits run away with her judgment. But she accomplishes a great deal of good in her way and has many fine traits of character. It is a pity she does herself such injustice.”

“Humph! Does she belong to the sisterhood of letters?”

“In a way—yes. Her articles upon the Working Girls of New York, written for newspaper publication two years ago, attracted so much attention that they were collected into a volume last summer.”

“She is a member of Sorosis—I gather from her tirade?”

“Oh, yes. One of the oldest members.”

“What a hotch-potch that society or club—or whatever you may choose to call it—must be! Do you know, darling, I never associate you—or any other true, refined woman with the crew to which you nominally belong? You are a lily among thorns in such a connection. I should rather say among thistles and burdocks and stramonium and the like rank, vile-smelling weeds.”

“I thank you for the pretty praise of myself,” smiling sweetly and fondly at him. “But I cannot accept it at the expense of fairer flowers than I can ever hope to be, true, strong women who are trying to help their sex to a higher plane and prepare them for better work than they have yet accomplished, in spite of the limitations of sex—”

He caught her up on the word.

“Don’t fall into their cant, for Heaven’s sake! The ‘limitations of sex’ are woman’s crown of glory. I have done some sober thinking lately—especially since the drubbing received from your Miss Marvel—with regard to the mooted subject of the emancipation of women, falsely so called. My conclusions may not coincide with your views upon the subject. But, perhaps you do not care to discuss it?”

Her face was sunny; her look at once fearless and confiding.

“We are both reasonable people, I hope. If we are not, we love each other too well not to agree amicably upon unavoidable disagreements.”

Barton tossed his cigar stump into the foam of the nearest wave; a touch of impatience went with fling and laugh.

“Isn’t that like a woman? She presupposes disagreement and forestalls argument by pledging herself to forgive for love’s sake whatever she will not admit. The wisest and best of the sex—and you are both of these—will press feeling into what should be impersonal debate. Perhaps it is safer to talk of other things. See that gull swoop down and come up empty-clawed. That is his fourth unsuccessful trip to market within thirty minutes. The passÉe belle upon the pavilion over there has had that rich youngling in tow twice as long. I will wager a pair of gloves against a buttonhole bouquet with you that she doesn’t land him.”

Neither tone nor manner was pleasant. Agnes laid her hand upon his arm.

“Won’t you go on with what you were about to say? I may not be able to argue. I think, with you, that logic is not woman’s forte. Perhaps we may learn, with time and education, to divorce thought and feeling. But I am a capital listener, and a willing learner.”

“You are an angel”—pressing the hand to his side, “and so far above Miss Marvel and her compeers in intellect and breeding that I fret at the alleged partnership. This talk of woman’s serfdom and the need of elevating her, mentally and politically, is stuff from first to last. Vile and pestilential stuff! Heresy against the teachings of Nature and of Him who ordained that man should be the superior being of the two. Those who are pressing forward in what they call Reform of Existing Wrongs are your worst enemies. You should need no champion but your other self, Man. In arraying one sex against the other, you antagonize him. I see this rampant attitude of woman everywhere and hourly. If a man resigns his seat in a public conveyance to a woman, she takes it arrogantly—not gratefully. She pushes him aside with sharp elbows in crowds, jostles him upon gangways, presses before him into doors, always with a ‘good-as-you’ air which exasperates the most amiable of us. Her voice is heard in debating societies; she sits beside man upon the rostrum; competes with him in business, often successfully, because she can live upon less than he. The devilish spirit of revolt permeates all grades of society. The home—God’s best gift to earth—has no longer a recognized governor, no judge to whom appeal is final. Sisters wrangle with brothers for equal educational advantages, instead of making home so pleasant that boys will be content to stay there. Women’s Clubs, Women’s Congresses, Women’s Protective Unions, are part and parcel of the disunion policy. Instead of refining man this is surely, if slowly, arousing the latent savage in him. When that does spring to action, let the weaker sex beware. Outraged natural laws will right themselves in the long run, but sometimes at fearful cost.”

Agnes was perfectly silent during this harangue, ignorant as was he of his resemblance to pudgy and pompous Uncle Simeon, while he beat the palm of the right hand with the empty left-hand glove, and rolled slightly from one leg to the other in the slow promenade. The bloom gradually receded from her cheeks, her profile was still and clear as a cameo. Her eyes were directed toward the gray-blues of the meeting line of wave and sky. Once she glanced up to follow the gull, rising from a fifth unsuccessful dip.

Presently she halted and leaned upon the parapet to watch the half-consumed cigar, swinging and bumping like a truncated canoe in the foam-fringes of the rising tide. Barton stopped with her without staying his talk. An impulse born of the innate savagery he imputed to his sex, bore him on. His wife’s very impassiveness irked him. Silence was non-sympathetic; white silence, like hers, chilling. Irritation, engendered by piqued vanity, does not withhold the home-thrust because the victim is dearly beloved.

“You do not like to hear me talk in this strain,” he pursued. “It is only natural that a woman of independent thought and action, accustomed to adulation, and to whom the excitement of a public hearing for whatever she has to say has become a necessity of existence; who has looked beyond the quiet round of home interests and home loves for a career; who has fed her imagination upon unreal scenes and situations—should——”

He could get no further. Fluent as he was in speech, he had wound himself up in nominative specifications, and the verb climax failed him unexpectedly.

“Should—what?” said Agnes, turning the set, tintless visage toward him. Her eyes, blank and questionless, showed how far from her thought was sarcastic pleasure in his discomfiture. Barton was too much incensed to reason.

“Should—and does sneer at her husband’s serious talk upon a matter in which, as he is fast discovering, his happiness is fatally involved!”

“Fatally! O Barton!”

Independent and strong-minded she might be to others, but he had hurt her terribly. The stifled cry took all her strength with it. She caught at the railing for support, and leaned upon it, sick and trembling.

He lifted his hat in mock courtesy.

“If you will excuse me I will continue my walk alone. It is useless to attempt the temperate discussion of any subject when my words are caught up in that tone and manner. May I take you back to the hotel?”

Agnes straightened herself up. Her color did not return, but her voice was her own. It had always a peculiar and vibrant melody, and her articulation was singularly distinct for an American speaking her own language.

“You misunderstand me. I did not mean to be abrupt, much less rude. If I seemed to be either or both I ask your forgiveness. You need not trouble yourself to escort me to the hotel. I will sit here for a while and then go in. I hope, when you think the matter over dispassionately, you will see that I could not be guilty of what you imply.”

He strode off toward the Fort, the deep sand somewhat derogatory to dignity of carriage, but favoring the increase of irritability. Agnes strolled slowly along the beach until she found a lonely rock upon the tip of a tongue of bleached sand, where she could sit and think out the bitterest hour she had ever known. People, passing upon pier and esplanade, saw her there all the forenoon, a slight figure whose gray gown matched in color the stones among which she sat, as motionless as they. The brackish tide rose slowly until the spray sprinkled her feet, whispering mournful things to rock and sand. She saw and heard nothing, while her eyes seemed to follow the stately sail and swoop of the gulls whose breasts showed whitely against the blue of the December sky.

Other wives than Lorraine Loree have wedded men of high degree only to find that “husbands can be cruel,” and more than Lorraine or Agnes dreamed of have made the discovery before the wane of the honeymoon.

This bride felt bruised and beaten all over, and suffered the more, not less, for her sorrowful bewilderment as to the exact cause of this, the first quarrel.