baby I was.  Bare conjugal civility required that on leaving the house Charlie should kiss me three times, and on returning six times:  anything short of that I should have considered a pre-monitory symptom of approaching separation.  If Charlie had ever been so savage as to call me plain “Lulie,” I should have felt certain he was sick and tired of me, and was repenting of having married me instead of that spectacled bas-bleu, Miss Minerva Henshaw, who read Buckle and talked dictionary.  I believe I was intoxicated with my own happiness, and was a little nonsensical because I was so happy.

Fortunately for the comfort of both Charlie and myself, his domestic cabinet consisted of a marvelously well-trained set of servants, who were simply perfect—­as perfect in their way as Charlie was in his.  They had been trained by Charlie’s mother, who had been the head of affairs in his house up to the hour of her death—­an event which had occurred some dozen years before my first meeting with Charlie.  Everybody said she had been a celebrated housekeeper, and Charlie’s devotion to her had been the talk of the country-side.  There were people malicious enough to say that if Charlie’s mother had never died, he would never have married, but I take the liberty of resenting such an assertion as a personal insult; for, although I don’t doubt the dear old lady was a perfect jewel in her way, yet, looking at the portrait of her which hangs over our parlor mantelpiece, I see the face of a hard, determined-looking woman with cold gray eyes and rigidly set mouth, in a funny-looking black dress, neither high-necked nor low-necked, having a starchy white ruffle round the edge, in vivid white contrast to the yellow skin; with grizzly, iron-gray curls peeping out from under a cap that is fearfully and wonderfully made, with a huge ruffled border radiating in a circumference of several feet, while its two black-and-white gauze ribbon strings lie in rigid exactness over her two rigidly exact shoulders.  Looking on this portrait, I do not thank anybody for saying that it was only because death chose that shining mark that I had found favor in Charlie’s eyes.

We had been married, I suppose, about six months, when, sitting one evening over a cozy wood-fire in our cozy little parlor, just under the work of art I have described at such length, Charlie committed his first matrimonial solecism.  He yawned, actually gaped—­an open-mouthed, audible, undeniable yawn!

Glancing up at him from my work (which consisted of the inevitable worked slippers without which no woman considers her wifehood absolutely asserted), I caught him in the act.  “Are you tired, Charlie?” I asked in accents of wifely anxiety.

Tired!  Poor fellow! he ought to have been, for he had ridden all over the plantation that day, had written two business letters, and smoked there’s no telling how many cigars, and had only taken one little cat-nap after dinner.

He was leaning back in his arm-chair, with his eyes fixed in mournful meditation upon his mother’s portrait (at least I thought so), when I asked him if he was tired, and I fancied he was thinking sad thoughts of the mother who had not been dead so very long as never to trouble the thoughts of the living; so, laying down my slippers, I crossed the rug and perched myself on Charlie’s knee.