Missouri Botanical Garden: 
56 $MF%MMy 1 OF ANNE MATURIN. 
gone, how tedious and unmeaning they all 
seemed. 
At this dreary time, however, Anne had 
one distraction which often answers very 
well in the circumstances, and, indeed, has 
been known to turn evil into good in a man- 
ner wonderful to behold. She had a lover. 
This lover was the Rector of the parish, a 
good man, who was one of Mrs. Hartley’s 
most frequent visitors, and a very eligible 
person indeed. Everybody felt that had it 
been- a luckless curate without a penny, it 
would have been much more in Anne’s way, 
who had not a penny herself. And prob- 
bably had it been so, Letty and Susan said, 
with justifiable vexation, Anne would have 
fancied him out of pure perversity. For the 
first moment, indeed, she seemed disposed 
to “ fancy” the Rector. Here would be the 
change she longed for. She would escape 
at least from what was intolerable around 
her. But after a while there seized upon 
Anne a visionary disgust for the life within 
her reach, which was almost stronger than 
the weariness she had felt with her actual 
existence. And she dismissed, almost with 
impatience, the good man who might have 
made her happy. Perhaps, however, Mr. 
Herbert was not altogether discouraged ; he 
begged to be considered a friend still ; he 
came to the house as before. He was of 
use to Anne, though she would not have 
acknowledged it ; and perhaps in thfc natural 
course of affairs, had nothing supervened, a 
pleasant termination might have come to 
the little romance, and all would have been 
well. 
“ The Francis Hartleys ” came back after 
a while and settled in their new house amid 
all the splendors of bridal finery. They 
“ went out ” a great deal, and happily had 
not much time to devote to “old Mrs. 
Hartley,” who liked that title as little as 
most people do. Mrs. Francis was a very 
fine and a very pretty bride. She was a 
spoiled child, accustomed to all manner of 
indulgences, and trained in that supreme 
self-regard which is of all dispositions of the 
mind the most inhuman, the least pardon- 
able by others. It was not her fault, Anne 
would sometimes say with perhaps some- 
thing of the toleration of contempt. She 
had been brought up to it; from her earliest 
years she had been the monarch of all she 
surveyed ; her comfort, the highest necessity 
on earth ; her pleasure, the law of everybody 
about her. Sometimes even this worst of 
all possible trainings does a generous spirit 
no harm ; but poor little Mrs. Francis had 
neither a generous spirit nor those qualities 
of imagination and humor which keep peo- 
ple often from making themselves odious or 
ridiculous. She had frankly adopted the 
pleasant doctrine of her own importance, 
and saw nothing that was not reasonable 
and natural in it. Further, the fact crept 
out by degrees that Mrs. Francis had a tem- 
per : undisciplined in everything, she was 
also undisciplined in this, and even in pres- 
ence of his family would burst into little ex- 
plosions of wrath against her husband, which 
filled the well-bred Hartleys with incredu- 
lous dismay. At these moments her pink 
color would flush into scarlet, her bosom 
would pant, her breath come short, and 
circles of excitement would form round her 
eyes. The pretty white of her forehead and 
neck became stained with patches of furious 
red, and the pretty little creature herself 
blazed into a small fury out of the smooth 
conventional being she generally appeared. 
That Francis soon became afraid of these 
ebullitions, and that Mrs. Francis was often 
ill after them, was very soon evident to his 
family. He came more to his mother as 
time went on, and though he did not speak 
of domestic discomfort, there was a tone in 
his voice, an under-current of bitterness in 
what he said, that did not escape even less 
keen observers than Anne. She, poor girl, 
had managed with infinite trouble to with- 
draw herself from the dangerous intimacy 
which her cousin had tried to thrust upon 
her. It was better, she felt, to allow him to 
draw conclusions favorable to his vanity than 
to permit him to hol'd her hand, to show her 
a tenderness which was fatal to her, and 
unbecoming in him. She gained her point, 
though not without difficulty, and it would 
be impossible to describe the mixture of 
softening compassion, sympathy, pain and 
contempt, with which Anne came to regard 
the man whom she had loved unawares all 
her life. Yes, even contempt — though per- 
haps it was not his fault, poor fellow, that 
he was under that , contemptible sway of 
weakness, which even the strong have to 
bow to, when an ungovemed temper is con- 
joined with a delicate frame and precarious 
health. But it was his fault that he had 
married a woman for whom he had no real 
love, no feeling strong enough to give him 
influence with her, or power over her; and 
it was his fault that he came back and made 
bitter speeches at his mother’s fire-side in- 
stead of making some effort worthy of a man 
to get his* own life in tune. These were the 
reflections of an inexperienced girl, one of 
