She now gathers round herself a select company of two or three female friends, whom the easy good-nature of her husband permits to stay in his house for months at a time. Into their sympathetic ears she pours the story of her woes, and gradually organises them into a trained band of disciplined conspirators, who make it their constant object to defend the wife by thwarting the husband. They have their signs and their pass-words. If the callous male, for the enjoyment of whose hospitality they seem to gain an additional zest by affecting to despise and defy him, should intimate at the dinner-table that he has ventured to make some arrangement without consulting them, they will raise their eyebrows, and look pityingly at the wife. She will inform them, in a tone of convinced melancholy, that she has long suspected that she was of no importance to any one, but that now she knows it for certain. She will then tell her husband that, as she is no longer allowed to interest herself in what he does, she has of course no opinion on the matter in hand, and that, if she had one, she would never think of offering it when she knows that all interference on her part is always so bitterly resented. Her husband's temper having exploded in the orthodox marital manner, she will smile sweetly upon him, and, the butler and footman having entered with the fish, will implore him, in a voice intended rather for the servants than for him, to moderate his anger, lest he should set a bad example. She will then weep silently into her tumbler, and her friends, after expressing a muttered indignation at the heartlessness of men, will support her tottering steps from the room. If her husband should invite one or two of his friends to dinner on a subsequent occasion, she will amuse herself and madden him by recounting to them this incident, in which she will figure as a suffering angel, whose wings have moulted under the neglect and cruel treatment of an unangelic spouse. If, while her story is in progress, she should observe her husband writhing, she will inform him that she is sure he must be sitting in a draught, and will order the butler to place a screen behind him. Having thus called attention to his discomfort, and to the care with which she watches over him, she will take offence when he countermands the screen; and, after giving the company in general to understand that she is not allowed to give orders in her own house, she will, for the rest of the evening, preserve a death-like calm. This will be followed, on the departure of her guests, by showers of tears and reproaches, the inevitable prelude to twenty-four hours of salts and seclusion in the privacy of her bed-room. It is curious to note that, although the Martyr, at an early period of her married life, developes a distaste for going into society, which she attributes to the persecution of her husband; yet she always contrives to spend as much money as those who live in a whirl of gaiety.