When the newly-wedded wife in pique had worried her spouse with scenes, they were only the ebullitions of a much-admired woman irritated by the loved one's coolness. Now she had trod the path of trouble so far that those days were out of ken. In her efforts to win back her husband she would even conciliate the mischief-maker. Some women seem specially created for martyrdom. Otherwise insignificant, we should not see them but for the dazzling whiteness of their robes. I dare say that many of the canonized young ladies whose legends thrill us would, had they not been called to march over the ploughshare of trial, have remained as much in obscurity as any other ordinary young persons, who are too stupid to make a pudding or darn a stocking. They would have passed utterly unnoticed in the crowd but for the martyr's nimbus. "The woman does not like me, and is rude," argued too guileless Gabrielle, as she considered her resolve, "but she is such a general favourite that surely she can't be a bad woman; she is only vulgar, and given to self-assertion. Perhaps the fault lies in myself." Bravely, then, the meek saint uprose and went straight to Aglae's apartment, bearing with her a peace-offering, bent on the making up of differences. But the sublime and the angelic were beyond the comprehension of mundane Aglae, who since infancy had known nothing but the sordid; whose childhood had been passed in a beast-like tussle, a constant struggle for food. To her thinking, the maxim anent the turning of the cheek is an insult to common sense, considering the world whereon we were placed without consent of ours. In Saturn or Jupiter, perhaps, such inflated theories may be appropriate. Those worlds may be pleasant places to dwell in. There, no doubt, a police force is not required, while the wily but necessary detective is pictured as a curiosity, an extinct monster, like the Dodo and the Mammoth on this globe. Mademoiselle Brunelle, an unromantic lady of middle age, too commonplace to enjoy the fantastic, looked on eccentricities with a jaundiced eye, and the contemplation made her peevish.