Ethelyn's Mistake

From Mrs. Senator Woodhull's elegant house--where Mrs. Judge Markham had

been petted, and flattered, and caressed, and Mr. Judge Markham had been

adroitly tutored and trained without the least effect--the newly wedded

pair went on to Quebec and Montreal, and thence to the White Mountains,

where Ethelyn's handsome traveling dress was ruined and Richard's linen

coat, so obnoxious to his bride, was torn past repair and laid away in

one of Ethelyn's trunks, with the remark that "Mother could mend it for

Andy, who always took his brother's cast-off clothes." The hair trunk

had been left in Chicopee, and so Ethelyn had not that to vex her.

Noticed everywhere, and admired by all whom she met, the first part of

her wedding trip was not as irksome as she had feared it might be.

Pleased, as a boy, with his young bride, Richard was all attention, and

Ethelyn had only to express a wish to have it gratified, so that casual

lookers-on would have pronounced her supremely happy. And Ethelyn's

heart did not ache one-half so hard as on that terrible day of her

bridal. In the railway car, on the crowded steamboat, or at the large

hotels, where all were entire strangers, she forgot to watch and

criticise her husband, and if any dereliction from etiquette did occur,

he yielded so readily to her suggestion that to him seemed an easy task.

The habits of years, however, are not so easily broken, and by the time

Saratoga was reached, Richard's patience began to give way beneath

Ethelyn's multifarious exactions and the ennui consequent upon his

traveling about so long. Still he did pretty well for him, growing very

red in the face with his efforts to draw on gloves a size too small, and

feeling excessively hot and uncomfortable in his coat, which he wore

even in the retirement of his own room, where he desired so much to

indulge in the cool luxury of shirt-sleeves--a suggestion which Ethelyn

heard with horror, openly exclaiming against the glaring vulgarity, and

asking, a little contemptuously, if that were the way he had been

accustomed to do at home.

"Why, yes," he answered. "Out West upon the prairies we go in for

comfort, and don't mind so small a matter as shirt-sleeves on a

sweltering August day."

"Please do not use such expressions as sweltering and go in--they do not

sound well," Ethelyn rejoined. "And now I think of it, I wish you would

talk more to the ladies in the parlor. You hardly spoke to Mrs. Cameron

last evening, and she directed most of her conversation to you, too. I

was afraid she would either think that you were rude, or else that you

did not know what to say."

"She hit it right, if she came to the latter conclusion," Richard said,

good-humoredly, "for the fact is, Ethie, I don't know what to say to

such women as she. I am not a ladies' man, and it's no use trying to

make me over. You can't teach old dogs new tricks."