As a girl, the Martyr will have been distinguished by a keen sense of wrong, and a total lack of all sense of humour. Having been rebuked by her mother for some trifling fault, she will persuade herself that her parents detest her, and desire her death. She will spend the next few days with her breast luxuriously against the thorn of her fancied sufferings. She will weave romances, in order to enjoy the delicious sensation of looking on as she withers under injustice into a premature coffin, and of watching her cruel parents as they water the grave of their victim with unavailing tears. A somewhat lax method of bringing up will have enabled her to read many trashy novels. Out of these she constructs an imaginary hero, all gushing tenderness and a tawny moustache. Having met a young man who fully realises her ideal in the latter particular, she promptly assumes his possession of the former, and accepts his proposal of marriage. After having all but thrown him over on three or four occasions for an insufficient display of romantic devotion at dances and tennis parties, she eventually marries him. Soon afterwards she discovers that he is not a chivalrous wind-bag, but a Man, whereupon she shatters his pedestal, and abandons herself to misery amidst the ruins. And now the full joys of her married martyrdom begin. She withdraws even from the affectation of interest in her partner, his friends and his pursuits. She spends her mornings in the keeping of a diary, or the writing of a novel, in which she appoints herself to the post of heroine, and endows her creation with a superhuman combination of unappreciated qualities. From the fact that her husband spends a large part of each day away from her, either in attending to his business or in following a sport, she infers that he has ceased to love her. When he returns in the evening, she locks herself into her room, and, having thus assured to herself solitude, she converts it, by an easy process, into the studied neglect of an unfeeling husband.