And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps cross--even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in the drawing-room would disturb him--at all events she cannot sing or play to-night; and even if she does--he has heard all her pieces so often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him, perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society only--_toujours perdrix_, without change or addition--is a little stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that things would be bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded _soirée_, or she might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's pleasure.