Yet Elise is quite contented, and Mr. Volney uses what little brain he has left to exult over his possession of such a beautiful young wife.

Elise upholds his dignity and flatters him into a belief that he is a great philanthropist and a social power, and in this way she has the handling of his millions, which is her idea of happiness.  She travels, entertains, and poses for photographs and paintings in imported gowns, and there is no rumour of discontent or divorce.

Meanwhile, Clarence, who was so opposed to her marriage because it was loveless, is making a mess of his own love-match, through his jealousy.

You, who knew him to be insanely jealous as a lover, and who seemed to be flattered with what you thought a proof of his devotion, appeal to me now to know what to do with the husband who is destroying your love and your happiness!  Surely, if Elise knew of this she might well say, “He laughs best who laughs last.”

I know that you were absorbed in Clarence for the first year of your married life, and that you gave no least cause for any jealousy, and I know, as you say, that even then he was often morbid and unhappy over nothing at all.

He was jealous even of girl friends and relatives, and if you attended a matinee with one of them, he sulked the whole evening.

This was little more than he did as a lover, and you should have begun in those days to reason him out of such moods.

You imagined then it was his mad love for you which caused his unreasonable jealousy.

But jealousy is self-love, and selfishness lies at the root of such conditions of mind as his.

A woman should say to a man who sulks or goes into tantrums when she pays courteous attentions to relatives or acquaintances, “You are lowering my ideal of you—­I cannot love a man who will indulge such unworthy moods.  You insult my womanhood and doubt my principles by your suspicions; you intimate that I have neither truth, or judgment, or pride.  You must conquer yourself, and learn to trust me and to believe in me, or I must decide I am no woman for you to take as a life companion.”  A man should take the same course toward a jealous sweetheart or wife.

A few quiet but firm assertions of this nature, when you were being wooed, would have given Clarence an idea that he could lose you, and that he was making himself ridiculous in your eyes.  Instead, you boasted to your friends how wildly infatuated he was, and Clarence took new pride in his own blemish of character.

Now that you have to live day, and night, and week, and month, and year, with this trait, it seems a less romantic phase of devotion, I fancy.  But you are not wise to grow reckless and ignore the wishes of your husband in all ways, because he is unreasonable.  “Since he is so absolutely impossible to please,” you say, “I may as well please myself.  I have decided to take some of the liberties so many of my acquaintances do, and enjoy life outside my home if I cannot enjoy it within.”