Never until her marriage had Cecil been familiar with the people who do the work of this world; and it was scarcely strange if her husband, in workday clothes and with his workday manners, seemed to her a being of a different race from that to which belonged the high-bred idlers she had been accustomed to encounter. She knew that he loved her; she knew that he was generous, and good, and true: but this knowledge was not enough. She knew that he was clever; but her lonely days were never brightened by any ray of his intellect, her desolate evenings were never enlivened by his wit. Was he _her_ husband? Was he not rather wedded to that inexorable tyrant which he called his profession? He loved his wife, and was anxious to please her, but not if her pleasure involved the neglect of his professional duties. If Cecil knew that she was beloved, she knew also that Giddles and Giddles and the subtle niceties of the law were nearer and dearer to her husband than she could ever be. It was the name of Giddles, mingled with scraps of an address to the court and jury, that he muttered in his fitful sleep,--it was how to avail himself of the weak points in Clithery's defence, or Shavington's, or Jones and Smith's cases, that he pondered as he brooded by the domestic hearth. "Why did he marry me?" she thought sometimes sadly; "I am of no use to him. I am no companion for him. A home for him is only a place in which he can eat and drink and sleep, and keep some of his law-books. If I speak to him at breakfast or dinner-time, I may disturb a train of thought by some idle word; and when he is asleep on the sofa, how is he the better off for my sitting on the opposite side of the fire yawning behind my book? The man who comes to him every evening with the red bag is more to him than I am, for the man and the bag belong to his profession." It is not to be supposed that even so busy a man as Mr. O'Boyneville lived in entire exclusion from all social intercourse with his fellow-men. There were stately dinner-parties to which he conducted his elegant young wife, and on rare occasions he gave a stately dinner at home. And then, once more, Lady Cecil was called upon to give her mind to the _menu_ of the feast; only in these latter days there were no harassing calculations of ways and means, no balancing of _fricandeau_ against calves' head _en tortue_, no weighing of lobster-cutlets against eels _à la tartare_. All Mr. O'Boyneville's ideas were large and liberal. His household was well organised, his servants few and efficient, his cellar richly furnished; and if the comfortable kitchen-wenches of Bloomsbury are behind the _chefs_ and _cordons bleus_ of Belgravia, the Bloomsbury confectioner is like "Todgers's," and can do the thing handsomely when he pleases.