‘What’s the matter, Dora?’

Dora would look up hopelessly, and reply, ‘They won’t come right.

They make my head ache so. And they won’t do anything I want!’

Then I would say, ‘Now let us try together. Let me show you, Dora.’

Then I would commence a practical demonstration, to which Dora would pay profound attention, perhaps for five minutes; when she would begin to be dreadfully tired, and would lighten the subject by curling my hair, or trying the effect of my face with my shirt-collar turned down. If I tacitly checked this playfulness, and persisted, she would look so scared and disconsolate, as she became more and more bewildered, that the remembrance of her natural gaiety when I first strayed into her path, and of her being my child-wife,