RoBards marveled at the perverse heroism with which she and other women endured these martyrdoms to vanity. He had ridiculed Patty’s devotion to tight stays for years, with the usual effect of male counsel on female conduct. She was not likely to yield to a husband’s satires, since her sex had mocked at similar opinion since the beginning of the world. Preachers had denounced corsets in vain; the word was not considered decent, but a man may say anything across a pulpit. Physicians had uttered warnings in private and public. They had traced all the evils of modern infirmity to corsets; but their patients groaned and persevered. Anatomists described the distorted livers and lungs of ladies they found in _post-mortems_—in vain. King Joseph II. had forbidden stays in orphan schools and convents and had put them on female convicts, in the hope of diminishing their prestige, but the women went their sweet way with secret laughter. When RoBards quoted the parsons against the corsets, Patty answered: “If God didn’t want women to wear corsets, why did he fill the seas with whales and fill the whales with whalebone? What else is it good for?” Heaven was an appellate court that RoBards did not practice in, and he dropped the case. To-night he had watched Patty devoting half an hour of anguish to the throttling of her waist. She slept in “night stays” now to make the daytime constriction easier, but the new peach blossom silk had demanded too much—or too little. After three efforts to pull the strings to the necessary tightness, she had sunk into a chair, bathed in sweat, pleading for help. And RoBards was so sorry for her that he actually put his strength to the infamous task of lacing his own wife into an impossible cone. But she thanked him for the torture and pirouetted before her mirror in rapture. And now in the carriage, though she could hardly sit up straight, she was so happy that RoBards, delighting in anything that could delight her, leaned near to press his lips against her cheek. She was the mother of a long family, yet she was still a girl, and a girl by virtue—or by vice—of avoiding the penalties of growing up. Her extravagances, her flippancies, her very determination to evade the burdens of grief and responsibility, her refusal to be in earnest about anything but beauty, were, after all, the only means of keeping beauty. At such moments, he felt that she and her sort alone were wise; and that those who bent to the yoke of life were not the wise and noble creatures they thought themselves, but only stolid, sexless, stupid oxen. She still had wings because she used them always, was always fugitive.