The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,” stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her granddaughter-in-law, as no words could have done it. I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage, and living apart from his wife,--a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter. The hapless sire--for this was the character he attempted--came upon the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts--elicited by counsel--to the contrary; and he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account, and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff. “You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?” The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I--I don’ know as I understand you, judge,” he faltered. “Do you mean that the plaintiff--the person whom your daughter threatened to beat--has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s affections away from her?” “Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left _me_ to support her.” “Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s husband away from her?”