he condescended to bestow himself upon a young and pretty heiress, who eloped with him from boarding-school. Fortunately for him, his wife proved to be one of those tender, devoted, womanly creatures, who never call in the aid of the head to destroy the illusions of the heart. Her love for her husband long outlived the qualities, real or imaginary, which had first called it into being, and in the dull selfish egotist of the fireside she could still see the brilliant and attractive man of fashion who had won her gratitude by deigning to accept her fortune and affection. When a woman is won unsought, in other words, when she loves _first_, she is always doubly enslaved by her affections, and this was decidedly the case with Mrs. Clifton. She fancied she could never do enough for her selfish husband, and he soon showed himself the despot when he found himself possessed of a slave. As he grew older he became a martyr to gout, and in the slovenly, plethoric, testy-looking, elderly man, who swore at his pale wife fifty times a day, and kept his only child in bodily fear by his fierce threats—none of his former friends would have recognized the “_model man of fashion_.” In the atmosphere of such a home, Minnie imbibed her first ideas of womanly duties and womanly rewards. She idolized her gentle mother, and that mother’s idea of home duties and virtues was condensed into one single article of faith—perfect submission to the will of a husband and father. Mrs. Clifton’s mind was too feeble, her experience too limited, and her affection to her husband too extravagant to allow her to entertain the slightest doubt of his wisdom or his virtue. She honestly believed woman to be the inferior creation, and her ideal of a wife was the patient Grizzel of the old Fabliaux—a creature whose will, whose wishes, whose very sense of duty was to be placed at a husband’s mercy. That men might be found whose noble, generous, self-forgetting affection would place woman like a queen upon the throne of their hearts, asking nothing in return but the enlightened and true devotion of a loving nature, was an idea that never had been presented to her imagination. She fancied that hers was but a common lot, and therefore she early trained Minnie to the servitude which she supposed would accomplish her destiny.