The life the pair lived after that was simply ridiculously miserable. He had lost his old social popularity, and was forced to sell his pictures to the cheap dealers, when he was lucky enough to sell them at all. The paternal allowance would not support the flat they first occupied, and they went into a boarding house. Inside of a month they were in the papers, on account of outbreaks on Mrs. Dobb's part against one of the ladies of the house. A couple of days after he leased a little room opening into his studio, converted it into a bed-room, and they settled there for good. Such a housekeeping as it was--like a scene in a farce. The studio had long since run to seed, and a perpetual odor of something to eat hung over it along with the sickening reek of the Florida water Mrs. D., like all other creoles, made more liberal use of than of the pure element it was half-named from. Crumbs and crusts and chop-bones, which the dog had left, littered the rugs; and I can not recall the occasion on which the caterer's tin box was not standing at the door, unless it was when the dirty plates were piled up, there waiting for him to come for them. I dined there once. Frank had had a savage quarrel with her that day, and wanted me for a bender. But the scheme availed him nothing, for she broke out over the soup and I left them to fight it out, and finished my feast at a chop house. All of his old flirtations came back to curse him now. His light loves of the playhouse and his innocent devotions of the ball room were alike the instruments fate had forged into those of punishment for him. The very names of his old fancies, which, with that subtle instinct all women possess, she had found out, were sufficient to send his wife into a frenzy. She was a chronic theatre-goer, and they never went to the theatre without bringing a quarrel home with them. If he was silent at the play she charged him with neglecting her; if he brisked up and tried to chat, her jealousy would soon pick out some casus belli in the small talk he strove to interest her with. A word to a passing friend, a glance at one of her own sex, was sufficient to set her going. I shall never question that jealousy is a form of actual madness, after what I saw of it in the lives of that miserable man and woman.