“Well, well, perhaps you are right:  it is difficult to trust oneself, much less any one else.  At any rate,” she said, with a bitter smile, “you have given me Bellamy, a start in society, and a sapphire necklace.  In twenty years, I hope, if the fates are kind, to have lost Bellamy on the road—­he is really unendurable—­to rule society, and to have as many sapphire necklaces and other fine things as I care for.  In enumerating my qualities, you omitted one, ambition.”

“With your looks, your determination, and your brains, there is nothing that you will not be able to do if you set your mind to it, and don’t make an enemy of your devoted friend.”

And thus the conversation ended.

Now little Bellamy had, after much anxious thought, just about this time come to a bold determination—­namely, to asset his marital authority over Mrs. Bellamy.  Indeed, his self-pride was much injured by the treatment he received at his wife’s hands, for it seemed to him that he was utterly ignored in his own house.  In fact, it would not be too much to say that he was an entire nonentity.  He had married Mrs. Bellamy for love, or rather from fascination, though she had nothing in the world—­married her in a fortnight from the time that George had first introduced him.  When he had walked out of church with his beautiful bride, he had thought himself the luckiest man in London, whereas now he could not but feel that matrimony had not fulfilled his expectations.  In the first place, Love’s young dream—­he was barely thirty—­came to a rude awakening, for, once married, it was impossible —­though he had, in common with the majority of little men, a tolerably good opinion of himself—­but that he should perceive that his wife did not care one brass farthing about him.  To his soft advances she was as cold as a marble statue, the lovely eyes never grew tender for him.  Indeed, he found that she was worse than a statue, for statues cannot indulge in bitter mockery and contemptuous comments, and Mrs. Bellamy could, and, what is more, frequently did.

“It is very well,” reflected her husband, “to marry the loveliest woman in the county, but I don’t see the use of it if she treats one like a dog.”

At last this state of affairs had grown intolerable, and, meditating in the solitude of his office, Mr. Bellamy resolved to assert himself once and for all, and set matters on a proper footing, and Mrs. Bellamy in her place.  But it is one thing for husbands of the Bellamy stamp to form high-stomached resolutions, and another for them to put those resolutions into active and visible operation on wives of the Mrs. Bellamy stamp.  Indeed, had it not been for a little incident about to be detailed, it is doubtful if Mr. Bellamy would have ever come to the scratch at all.

When George had gone, Mrs. Bellamy sat down in by no means the sweetest of tempers to think.  But thinking in this instance proved an unprofitable occupation, and she gave it up, in order to admire the sapphire necklace that lay upon her knee.  At that moment her husband entered the room, but she took no notice, merely going on examining the stones.  After moving about a little, as though to attract attention, the gentleman spoke.