Other men’s wives were intellectual if not beautiful, or beautiful if not intellectual, but mine was neither. It is my candid judgment, and I write it with sorrow and pity, that she had not a single good quality. (I have thought it all over, before proceeding, and assert it again: Not one.) I think she never went to bed in her life that she did not drink some sort of tea for some sort of complaint, and it was her only boast that in all the world a woman could not be found who “bore up” as well as she did. She took pride in nothing else; she had no other ambition than to demonstrate that such was the case, and had no other delight than to cite evidences of it. I beg you will remember that these are cold, calculated assertions of fact, and not illustrative in any degree. I have spent several weeks in writing this letter, in a manner that cannot be misconstrued; every word has been weighed, and put down after its effect and the impression it would convey had been carefully considered. She took not the slightest interest in me nor my affairs; indeed, she took interest in nothing except her family, which worried her so much that frequently she awakened in the night, and cried for hours like a silly child for fear her mother, or her father, or her brothers, or her sisters, were not well, although there would not be the slightest reason to suppose they were not enjoying their usual health. This circumstance is particularly worthy of note when it is known that she did not get along with her family, for they were always quarrelling when together, and although they were the most ordinary people, she talked of them, and wondered what would they say to this or that, so much that I gently remonstrated with her. This she construed into an attack, and while I lived with her she regularly vindicated “her family” whenever I came into her presence, in a manner indicating that they were of royal blood. They moved away from there after we had been married a few years, and this gave her occasion to bewail her separation from them, which she never lost opportunity to do. Her father was a perfect type of a common man; the mother was a little better, perhaps, but the brothers and sisters did not average with the young people in the poor town where they were brought up, so that this great admiration was unwarranted, and ridiculous. But if it were disagreeable when “her family” were in the same town with us, it was unbearable when they were away. For every month of their separation she added a hall, park or castle to her father’s possessions--which consisted in reality of battered household goods that a really vigorous man could have carried away on his back. Finally I began to think seriously of running away.