If one wishes to construct a reasonable hypothesis on a subject where the facts are either wanting or conflicting, it is not impossible to suggest a solution of this puzzle about Houston.  Although his abandoned wife never spoke of him and shut her lips tightly when she was questioned about him, Houston, on his part, was not so taciturn.  He never consciously gave any direct clue to his matrimonial mystery; but he never forgot this girl who was his bride and whom he seems always to have loved.  In what he said he never ceased to let a vein of self-reproach run through his words.

I should choose this one paragraph as the most significant.  It was written immediately after they had parted: 

Eliza stands acquitted by me.  I have received her as a virtuous, chaste wife, and as such I pray God I may ever regard her, and I trust I ever shall.  She was cold to me, and I thought she did not love me.

And again he said to an old and valued friend at about the same time: 

“I can make no explanation.  I exonerate the lady fully and do not justify myself.”

Miss Allen seems to have been a woman of the sensitive American type which was so common in the early and the middle part of the last century.  Mrs. Trollope has described it for us with very little exaggeration.  Dickens has drawn it with a touch of malice, and yet not without truth.  Miss Martineau described it during her visit to this country, and her account quite coincides with those of her two contemporaries.

Indeed, American women of that time unconsciously described themselves in a thousand different ways.  They were, after all, only a less striking type of the sentimental Englishwomen who read L. E. L. and the earlier novels of Bulwer-Lytton.  On both sides of the Atlantic there was a reign of sentiment and a prevalence of what was then called “delicacy.”  It was a die-away, unwholesome attitude toward life and was morbid to the last degree.

In circles where these ideas prevailed, to eat a hearty dinner was considered unwomanly.  To talk of anything except some gilded “annual,” or “book of beauty,” or the gossip of the neighborhood was wholly to be condemned.  The typical girl of such a community was thin and slender and given to a mild starvation, though she might eat quantities of jam and pickles and saleratus biscuit.  She had the strangest views of life and an almost unnatural shrinking from any usual converse with men.

Houston, on his side, was a thoroughly natural and healthful man, having lived an outdoor life, hunting and camping in the forest and displaying the unaffected manner of the pioneer.  Having lived the solitary life of the woods, it was a strange thing for him to meet a girl who had been bred in an entirely different way, who had learned a thousand little reservations and dainty graces, and whose very breath was coyness and reserve.  Their mating was the mating of the man of the forest with the woman of the sheltered life.