But marriage is not the only lofty undertaking attended by petty miseries.  Mrs. Tarbell could bear her great misfortunes with courage and resolution:  as she had great hopes, so she expected great disasters.  Not Lars Porsenna of Clusium himself was more clapped on the back, and huzzahed after, and backed up by the augurs, nor more frequently told that he was the beloved of heaven, than Mrs. Tarbell had been by her soothsayers and partisans.  At first this was all very well, but afterward it grew tiresome.  If Mrs. Tarbell, emerging from widowhood and placing herself in the van of feminine progress, was really a pioneer in a heaven sent mission (as perhaps she was), there was no need to repeat the phrase so often.  When two or three years had gone by, and it began to be apparent that Mrs. Tarbell had a long and up-hill struggle before her, she became very impatient of enthusiasm.  She had never liked it, even when the female welkin (if there be such a thing) had first rung with applause for her, and now it was painfully uncomfortable.  Mrs. Lucretia Pegley (authoress of “Woman’s Wrongs,” “The Weaker Sex?” “Eve v. Adam,” etc., etc., editor of “Woman’s Sphere,” and chief contributor to the “Coming Era;” her friends called her a Boadicea, and denied that she had withdrawn from the study of medicine because she had fainted at her first operation),—­Mrs. Pegley observed her friend’s shortness of temper, and took her to task about it.  “Ellen Tarbell,” she said, “you surprise me very much.  Do you wish to give the impression that your motives are purely personal and—­forgive me, but the word is necessary—­selfish? that you have no interest in the movement in which you are a pioneer? that your heart is not with the cause which after so many years of weary waiting looks to you for advancement?  Mr. Botts is a most worthy and indefatigable man; perhaps a trifle too much addicted to repetition for the sake of rhetorical effect,—­a thing, I admit, very trying; but it is of the highest importance (I say this between ourselves, of course, and you may imagine that I would not give publicity to such a statement),—­it is of the highest importance that the feelings of our—­hem—­masculine colleagues should not be—­”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Mrs. Tarbell hastily, “I appreciate that fully, I assure you.  But yesterday evening I was rather tired, and I—­”

“Tired!” said Mrs. Pegley, in the voice of acute anguish which caused her to be known as a woman of the most extraordinary intensity of convictions.  “It is a wonder we are not all in our graves,” she added, in tones whose sombre depth was brightened by a little colloquial levity, for she felt that she had been too severe with Mrs. Tarbell.  “Still,” she continued, “after Mr. Bott’s very flattering remarks you might have spoken with a little more—­er—­earnestness and—­er—­vigor yourself, you know.  And for such an audience as we had last night, three minutes is really—­”