An infatuated fellow, this Frank Churchill; so happy in the possession of his wife, in the knowledge that she was his own, all his own, that nothing, not even the fact that she was occasionally a "little low," had power to damp his happiness for more than a very few minutes. He would sit at dinner of an evening, when she was engaged with her work, and he had a book in front of him, in company, when he could steal a minute from the general conversation, looking at her in rapt admiration; not one point of her beauty was lost upon him; the shape of her head; its _pose_ on her neck; her delicate hands with that pink shell-like palm; those long tapering fingers and filbert nails; her rounded bust and slim waist,--all her special excellences impressed him more now than they had when he had first seen her; but, above all, he revelled in her "bred" appearance, in that indefinable something which seemed to lift her completely out of the set of people with which he saw her surrounded, and to show her by right the denizen of another sphere. If you could have persuaded Frank Churchill that another man held such opinions as these; that another man had such feelings with regard to his wife; and that through holding them he was induced to regard somewhat intolerantly those among whom he had hitherto moved, and from whom he had received the greatest kindness and friendship,--what words would have been scathing enough to have expressed Frank Churchill's disgust! Yet such was undoubtedly the case. Churchill's most intimate friend was George Harding,--a man whom he reverenced and looked up to, but whom he, since his marriage, had often found himself pitying from the bottom of his soul. Not on his own account: loyal to his craft and steadfast in his friendship, Churchill thought there were few more desirable positions than the editorship of the _Statesman_, when as free from influence or partisanship as when Harding held the berth. It was because his friend was Mrs. Harding's husband that Churchill pitied him; though, indeed, Mrs. Harding was a very fair average kind of woman. A dowdy little person, Mrs. Harding! the daughter of a snuffy Welsh rector, who had written a treatise on "Aorists," and with whom Harding had read one long vacation,--a round-faced old-maidish little woman, classically brought up, who could construe Cicero fluently, and looked upon Horace (Q. Flaccus, I mean) as rather a loose personage. In the solitude of Plas-y-dwdllem, George Harding was thrown into the society of this young female. He did not fall in love with her--they were neither of them capable of any thing violent of that nature; but--I am reduced to the phraseology of the servants' hall to express my meaning--they "kept company together;" and when George took his degree and started in life as leader-writer for the _Morning Cracker_ (long since defunct), he thought the best thing he could do for his comfort was to go for a run to Wales and bring back Sophia Evans as his wife.