Nobody had ever quite understood Isabel; and least of all could George Gilbert understand the woman whom he had chosen for his wife. He loved her and admired her, and he was honestly anxious that she should be happy; but then he wanted her to be happy according to his ideas of happiness, and not her own. He wanted her to be delighted with stiff little tea-parties, at which the Misses Pawlkatt, and the Misses Burdock, and young Mrs. Henry Palmer, wife of Mr. Henry Palmer junior, solicitor, discoursed pleasantly of the newest patterns in crochet, and the last popular memoir of some departed Evangelical curate. Isabel did not take any interest in these things, and could not make herself happy with these people. Unluckily she allowed this to be seen; and, after a few tea-parties, the Graybridge aristocracy dropped away from her, only calling now and then, out of respect for George, who was heartily compassionated on account of his most mistaken selection of a wife. So Isabel was left to herself, and little by little fell back into very much the same kind of life as that which she had led at Camberwell. She had given up all thought of beautifying the house which was now her home. After that struggle about the ottoman, there had been many other struggles in which Isabel had pleaded for smaller and less expensive improvements, only to be blighted by that hard common sense with which Mr. George Gilbert was wont--on principle--to crush his wife's enthusiasm. He had married this girl because she was unlike other women; and now that she was his own property, he set himself conscientiously to work to smooth her into the most ordinary semblance of every-day womanhood, by means of that moral flat-iron called common sense. Of course he succeeded to admiration. Isabel abandoned all hope of making her new home pretty, or transforming George Gilbert into a Walter Gay. She had made a mistake, and she accepted the consequences of her mistake; and fell back upon the useless dreamy life she had led so long in her father's house. The surgeon's duties occupied him all day long, and Isabel was left to herself. She had none of the common distractions of a young matron. She had no servants to scold, no china to dust, no puddings or pies or soups or hashes to compound for her husband's dinner. Mrs. Jeffson did all that kind of work, and would have bitterly resented any interference from the "slip of a girl" whom Mr. Gilbert had chosen for his wife. Isabel did as she liked; and this meant reading novels all day long, or as long as she had a novel to read, and writing unfinished verses of a lachrymose nature on half-sheets of paper.