“I have nothing more to say,” was his repeated answer to the running fire which his wife kept up against him for a long time.  “You are mistress of the house; act your own pleasure.  Thank you for the suggestion about dinner.  I may find it convenient to act thereon.”

The last part of this sentence was extorted by the continued irritating language of Mrs. Uhler.  Its utterance rather cooled the lady’s indignant ardor, and checked the sharp words that were rattling from her tongue.  A truce to open warfare was tacitly agreed upon between the parties.  The antagonism was not, however, the less real.  Mrs. Uhler knew that her husband expected of her a degree of personal attention to household matters that she considered degrading to her condition as a wife; and, because he expected this, she, in order to maintain the dignity of her position, gave even less attention to these matters than would otherwise have been the case.  Of course, under such administration of domestic affairs, causes for dissatisfaction on the part of Mr. Uhler, were ever in existence.  For the most part he bore up under them with commendable patience; but, there were times when weak human nature faltered by the way—­when, from heart-fulness the mouth would speak.  This was but to add new fuel to the flame.  This only gave to Mrs. Uhler a ground of argument against her husband as an unreasonable, oppressive tyrant; as one of the large class of men who not only regard woman as inferior, but who, in all cases of weak submission, hesitate not to put a foot upon her neck.

Some of the female associates, among whom Mrs. Uhler unfortunately found herself thrown, were loud talkers about woman’s rights and man’s tyranny; and to them, with a most unwife-like indelicacy of speech, she did not hesitate to allude to her husband as one of the class of men who would trample upon a woman if permitted to do so.  By these ladies she was urged to maintain her rights, to keep ever in view the dignity and elevation of her sex, and to let man, the tyrant, know, that a time was fast approaching when his haughty pride would be humbled to the dust.

And so Mrs. Uhler, under this kind of stimulus to the maintainance of her own rights against the imaginary aggressions of her husband, trampled upon his rights in numberless ways.

As time wore on, no change for the better occurred.  A woman does not reason to just conclusions, either from facts or abstract principles like man; but takes, for the most part, the directer road of perception.  If, therefore her womanly instincts are all right, her conclusions will be true; but if they are wrong, false judgment is inevitable.  The instincts of Mrs. Uhler were wrong in the beginning, and she was, in consequence, easily led by her associates, into wrong estimates of both her own and her husband’s position.