And her home? It was small, and dull, and dreary; but had she been led to anticipate any thing else? No; she supposed not. And yet she wore herself out in those gaunt dark rooms, and chafed in her prison like a bird in its cage. She had always been a bad correspondent, and since her marriage had scarcely written any letters at all; but she would sit mooning over the pages of a novel, or over the stitches of her embroidery, until book or work would fall from her hand; and there she would remain, looking intently at nothing, staring vacantly before her. Frank caused her to be supplied regularly with a copy of the _Statesman_, and in it she tried to read his articles--an honest attempt in which she dismally failed. Her aunt had been somewhat of a keen politician, and Barbara was sufficiently well informed on the position of English parties to bear her share in a dinner-table dialogue; but foreign affairs principally occupied Frank's pen in the _Statesman_; and after an attempted course of reading about Moldo-Wallachia, Schleswig-Holstein, and the Principalities, including an immense amount of virtuous indignation, the reason for which she did not comprehend, and the object of which she could not make out, poor Barbara gave it up in despair. She was in the habit of glancing occasionally at that portion of the paper in which Mr. Henchman chronicled the doings of the fashionable world, and recorded the names of those present at great entertainments; and sometimes when Barbara would raise her eyes from the paper and look down the hot vista of frowning houses in Great Adullam Street, where dust and straw were blowing in a penetrating cloud, and whence the dismal howling of itinerant hucksters fell upon the ear, she, remembering what part she had recently played among those of whom she had been reading, and contrasting it with her then life, would bite her lip until the blood started, and sob bitterly. Where was her spirit, do you ask? Has she not been represented as a girl of special spirit and pluck? Did not the early-narrated incidents of her career, her very marriage, prove this? and is it natural that she should break down before petty annoyances such as these? These questions have been asked; and all I can reply is, that I paint according to my lights and to my experience of life; and I believe that there are hundreds of women of spirit who would bear the amputation of a finger with more fortitude than the non-arrival of a bonnet, and who suffer less in separation from those they dearly love than in the necessity for a daily inspection of the bread-pan.