“Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly pretty soon.”

She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would steal over her face.  He liked to produce that glow.  Yet always his manner toward her was tenderness itself.  He regarded her as some dainty bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about with a chair.  Their union has been regarded as ideal.  That is Twichell’s opinion and Howells’s.  The latter sums up: 

    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
    but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
    most perfect.

XCVII

THE WALK TO BOSTON

The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places, as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their landscape.  Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens wrote: 

The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more soft and beautiful than usual.  Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden with autumn leaves.

And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.

Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage.  We have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to rest and left the west balcony to me.  There is a shining and most marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....

There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a sea-shell.  But now a muskrat is swimming through it and obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from his shoulders.

    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
    the grounds discussing the house.

Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada habit of pedestrian wandering.  Talcott’s Tower, a wooden structure about five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away almost unnoticed.  How many things they talked of in those long walks!  They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature and history and politics.  Unorthodox discussions they were, illuminating, marvelously