"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. "Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him "Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her "exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own