Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in
Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his
waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the
distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance,
her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and
air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.
"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not
grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set
her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and
wonder that she is not wordly-wise."
He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife
again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the
right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this
morning.
"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta
taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the
marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this
day."
The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and
widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and
cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to
wander along its sluices as this morn.
"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said,
restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other!
But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us
years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic
gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits.
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