A woman without magnanimity, without generosity, who has no love, and whom a man loves, is a terrible antagonist.  To give up or to fight often seems equally impossible.

How is a man going to make a woman have a good time, who is determined not to have it?  Lillie had sense enough to see, that, if she settled down into enjoyment of the little agreeablenesses and domesticities of the winter society in Springdale, she should lose her battle, and John would keep her there for life.  The only way was to keep him as uncomfortable as possible without really breaking her power over him.

In the long-run, in these encounters of will, the woman has every advantage.  The constant dropping that wears away the stone has passed into a proverb.

Lillie meant to go to New York, and have a long campaign at the Follingsbees.  The thing had been all promised and arranged between them; and it was necessary that she should appear sufficiently miserable, and that John should be made sufficiently uncomfortable, to consent with effusion, at last, when her intentions were announced.

These purposes were not distinctly stated to herself; for, as we have before intimated, uncultivated natures, who have never thought for a serious moment on self-education, or the way their character is forming, act purely from a sort of instinct, and do not even in their own minds fairly and squarely face their own motives and purposes; if they only did, their good angel would wear a less dejected look than he generally must.

Lillie had power enough, in that small circle, to stop and interrupt almost all its comfortable literary culture.  The reading of Froude was given up.  John could not go to the study club; and, after an evening or two of trying to read up at home, he used to stay an hour later at his office.  Lillie would go with him on Tuesday evening, after the readings were over; and then it was understood that all parties were to devote themselves to making the evening pass agreeable to her.  She was to be put forward, kept in the foreground, and every thing arranged to make her appear the queen of the fete.  They had tableaux, where Rose made Lillie into marvellous pictures, which all admired and praised.  They had little dances, which Lillie thought rather stupid and humdrum, because they were not en grande toilette; yet Lillie always made a great merit of putting up with her life at Springdale.  A pleasant English writer has a lively paper on the advantages of being a “cantankerous fool,” in which he goes to show that men or women of inferior moral parts, little self-control, and great selfishness, often acquire an absolute dominion over the circle in which they move, merely by the exercise of these traits.  Every one being anxious to please and pacify them, and keep the peace with them, there is a constant succession of anxious compliances and compromises going on around them; by all of which they are benefited in getting their own will and way.