ssion that her type
was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing
so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a
gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour
was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew
Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of
blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved
beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
been."

"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the
perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed
with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she
wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;
and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when
fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to
her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of
the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features
had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people
who habitually "expect the worst."

"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she
nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think it would be a
comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let
me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm
unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.

"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point
of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the
bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.

"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the
baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm
of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the
red wall from which

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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