so openly attacked him as on that day, the third after their arrival, when to her horror he took off his coat, preparatory to a little comfort, while she was dressing for dinner.  At Ethelyn’s request, however, he put it on again, saying as he did so, that he was “sweating like a butcher,” which remark called out his wife’s contemptuous inquiries concerning his habits at home.  Richard was still too much in love with his young wife to feel very greatly irritated.  In word and deed she had done her duty toward him thus far, and he had nothing to complain of.  It is true she was very quiet and passive, and undemonstrative, never giving him back any caress as he had seen wives do.  But then he was not very demonstrative himself, and so he excused it the more readily in her, and loved her all the same.  It amused him that a girl of twenty should presume to criticise him, a man of thirty-two, a Judge, and a member of Congress, to whom the Olney people paid such deference, and he bore with her at first just as a mother would bear with the little child which assumed a superiority over her.

This afternoon, however, when she said so much to him, he was conscious of a very little irritation, for he was naturally high-spirited.  But he put the feeling down, and gayly kissed his six-weeks bride, who, touched with his forbearance, kissed him back again, and suffered him to hold her cool face a moment between his hot, moist hands, while he bent over her.

She did respect him in spite of his vulgarism; nor was she unconscious of the position which, as his wife, she held.  It was very pleasant to hear people say of her when she passed by: 

“That is Mrs. Judge Markham, of Iowa—­her husband is a member of Congress.”

Very pleasant, too, to meet with his friends, other M. C.’s, who paid her deference on his account.  Had they stayed away from Saratoga all might have been well; but alas, they were there, and so was all of Ethelyn’s world—­the Tophevies, the Hales, the Hungerfords and Van Burens, with Nettie Hudson, opening her great blue eyes at Richard’s mistakes and asking Frank in Ethelyn’s hearing, “if that Judge Markham’s manners were not a little outre.”

They certainly were outre, there was no denying it, and Ethelyn’s blood tingled to her finger tips as she wondered if it would always be so.  It is a pitiable thing for a wife to blush for her husband, to watch constantly lest he depart from those little points of etiquette which women catch intuitively, but which some of our most learned men fail to learn in a lifetime.  And here they greatly err, for no man, however well versed he may be in science and literature, is well educated, or well balanced, or excusable, if he neglects the little things which good breeding and common politeness require of him, and Richard was somewhat to be blamed.  It did not follow because his faults had never been pointed out to him that they did not exist, or that others did