This was beyond what the high spirited lady could bear, and she retorted with more feeling than discretion: 

“Love is not blind in my case, I can assure you, Frederick, and never will be.  You are very ungraceful and untidy, and annoy me, sometimes, excessively.  I wish you would try to correct these things.”

“You do?”

There was something cool and provoking in the way Lee said this.

“I do, Frederick, and I’m in earnest.”

The cheeks of Kate were in a glow, and her eyes lit up, and her lips quivering.

“How long since you made the discovery that I was only a country clod-hopper?” said Lee, who was particularly annoyed by Kate’s unexpected charges against his good-breeding.

“I didn’t say you were only a country clod-hopper,” replied Kate.

“I believe you used the words.  My ears rarely deceive me.  I must own to feeling highly complimented.”

“Do sit up straight, Frederick!  Do take your leg from over the arm of that chair!  You make me so nervous that I can hardly contain myself.”

“Really!  I thought a man was privileged to sit in any position he pleased in his own house.”

The excitement of Kate’s mind had, by this time, reached a crisis.  Bursting into tears, she hurried from the room, and went sobbing up to her chamber.

Here was a fine state of affairs, indeed!  Was ever a man so perverse and unreasonable?

Did Frederick Lee follow, quickly, his weeping wife?  No; his pride was too deeply wounded for that.

“A country clod-hopper!  Undignified and ungraceful!  Upon my word!” Such were some of his mental ejaculations.  And then, as his feelings grew excited, he started up from his chair and began pacing the floor, muttering, as he did so—­

“It is rather late in the day to make this discovery!  Why didn’t she find it out before?  Humph!”

Meanwhile, Kate had thrown herself across her bed, where she lay, weeping bitterly.

What a storm had suddenly been blown about their ears!

It was fully an hour before Frederick Lee’s disturbed feelings began to run at all clear.  He was both surprised and offended.  What could all this mean?  What had all at once come over his young wife?

“A country clod-hopper!” he muttered to himself over and over again.  “Ungraceful—­ungenteel, and all that!  Very complimentary, indeed!”

When Lee joined his wife in their chamber, two hours after she had left him, he found that she had retired to bed and was sleeping.

On the next morning both looked very sober, and both were cold and distant.  A few words only passed between them.  It was the same when they met at dinner-time, and the same when Lee came home in the evening.  During the whole of this day, the thought of each was upon the other; but it was not a forgiving thought.  Kate cherished angry feelings toward her husband; and Lee continued to be offended at the freedom of expression which his young wife had ventured to use toward him.  Of course, both were very unhappy.