“Six months have passed since you were married,” said Mrs. Morton one day to Kate.

“Yes, six months have flown on wings of perfume,” replied the happy wife.

“I saw Frederick yesterday.”

“Did you?”

“Yes; and I knew him the moment my eyes rested upon him.”

“Knew him!  Why shouldn’t you know him?”

Kate looked a little surprised.

“I thought he was to be so changed under your hands in six months, that I would hardly recognise him.”

There was an arch look in Mrs. Morton’s eyes, and a merry flutter in her voice.

“Mrs. Morton!  Now that is too bad!”

“Your experiment failed, did it not, dear?”

The door of the room in which the ladies were sitting opened at the moment, and Frederick Lee entered.

“Not entirely,” whispered Kate, as she bent to the ear of her friend.  “He is vastly improved—­at least, in my eyes.”

“And in others’ eyes, too,” thought Mrs. Morton, as she arose and returned the young man’s smiling salutation.

“My fortune’s made.”

My young friend, Cora Lee, was a gay, dashing girl, fond of dress, and looking always as if, to use a common saying, just out of a bandbox.  Cora was a belle, of course, and had many admirers.  Among the number of these, was a young man named Edward Douglass, who was the very “pink” of neatness in all matters pertaining to dress, and exceedingly particular in his observance of the little proprieties of life.

I saw, from the first, that if Douglass pressed his suit, Cora’s heart would be an easy conquest, and so it proved.

“How admirably they are fitted for each other!” I remarked to my husband, on the night of their wedding.  “Their tastes are similar, and their habits so much alike, that no violence will be done to the feelings of either in the more intimate associations that marriage brings.  Both are neat in person and orderly by instinct, and both have good principles.”

“From all present appearances, the match will be a good one,” replied my husband.  There was, I thought, something like reservation in his tone.

“Do you really think so?” I said, a little ironically, for Mr. Smith’s approval of the marriage was hardly warm enough to suit my fancy.

“Oh, certainly!  Why not?” he replied.

I felt a little fretted at my husband’s mode of speaking, but made no further remark on the subject.  He is never very enthusiastic nor sanguine, and did not mean, in this instance, to doubt the fitness of the parties for happiness in the marriage state—­as I half imagined.  For myself, I warmly approved of my friend’s choice, and called her husband a lucky man to secure, for his companion through life, a woman so admirably fitted to make one like him happy.  But a visit which I paid to Cora one day about six weeks after the honeymoon had expired, lessened my enthusiasm on the subject, and awoke some unpleasant doubts.  It happened that I called soon after breakfast.  Cora met me in the parlour, looking like a very fright.  She wore a soiled and rumpled morning wrapper; her hair was in papers; and she had on dirty stockings, and a pair of old slippers down at the heels.