wages and are well flogged into the bargain. I have my opportunities, which I improve, and hence they work for me. Ha! it is charming! They get their two plantation suits a year, their three and a half pounds of bacon and their peck of meal apiece a week, which is not costly, and keeps them in working order. They are up early and down late, and so profits accrue. Hence the value of opportunities with regard to the dear negroes—my little exactions of whom wound your sensibilities, my angelic Josephine.” He paused to drink his claret slowly and refill his glass, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who sat secretly wondering what he meant by all this devilish frankness. “Now,” resumed the planter, “observe again the value of opportunities in relation to yourself, _ma chère_. I marry you. Good. We live in much elegance, to your soul’s delight, in New Orleans. Good again. But one fine day I bring you up here, and here I keep you, where you don’t want to stay. Why do you stay, then? Ah! the beautiful social system gives me the opportunity to make you. Could you bring me up here? Oh, no. Could you make me stay? Oh, no. The beautiful social system does not give you that opportunity.” “No,” she cried, “it gives me nothing.” “And why?” he continued. “Is it because you are morally, mentally, or in any way, my inferior? Oh, no. Why, then? Simply because you are a woman. You are less than I by virtue of your sex, my angel. Ha! it is curious. The beautiful social system makes you something like my slave, dear wife. I bring my negroes here, and I bring you here. None of you want to come, but you can’t help yourselves, and so come you do. But my negroes cannot bring me here. No. Nor can you bring me here. No. Do my negroes run away? I set Dunwoodie’s hounds after them, and run them down. Do you run away? That dear old Mrs. Grundy sets her hounds after you, and runs you down. Ah!” He paused to drink a little claret, keeping his eyes fixed upon her face. “Meanwhile,” he pursued, “I keep you in perpetual torment, as you say. Try divorce. You have no cause in law, for I take care to give you none. My little, delicate, subtle, intangible, polite aggravations—all my skillful outrages and profanations of your soul and body, which drive you mad, or kill you slowly like poison, are not recognized in law. My courteous, maddening words and actions, which work, it is true, the effect, and worse than the effect, of the most brutal physical cruelty—they are all perfectly legal. It is doubtful whether they could even be stated for the purposes of a divorce suit. They are so subtle, so veiled in good nature, courtesy, kindness, legality, that if they were stated, people probably would laugh at you, and think you dishonest or deranged. At all events, though they slowly madden or murder you, they constitute no breach of holy matrimony.” “They do,” she cried. “I do not care what the law says; such matrimony as I live in is not holy. It is”—