Married Life | Page 8

passiveness of Amanda encouraged in Lane his natural love of ruling. His household was his kingdom, and there his will must be the law. In his mind arose the conceit that, in every thing, his judgment was superior to that of his wife: even in the smaller matters of household economy, he let this be seen. His taste, too, was more correct, and applied itself to guiding and directing her into a proper state of dressing. He decided about the harmony of colours and the choice of patterns. She could not buy even a ribbon without there being some fault found with it, as not possessing the elements of beauty in just arrangements. In company, you would often hear him say--"Oh, my wife has no taste. She would dress like a fright if I did not watch her all the time."
Though outwardly passive or concurrent when such things were said, Amanda felt them as unjust, and they wounded her more or less severely, according to the character of the company in which she happened at the time to be; but her self-satisfied husband saw nothing of this. And not even when some one, more plainly spoken than others, would reply to such a remark--"She did not dress like a fright before you were married," did he perceive his presumption and his errors.
But passiveness under such a relation does not always permanently remain; it was accompanied from the first by a sense of oppression and injustice, though love kept the feeling subdued. The desire for ruling in any position gains strength by activity. The more the young wife yielded, the more did the husband assume, until at length Amanda felt that she had no will of her own, so to speak. The con- viction of this, when it formed itself in her mind, half involuntarily brought with it an instinctive feeling of resistance. Here was the forming point of antagonism--the beginning of the state of unhappiness foreshadowed from the first. Had Amanda asserted her right to think and act for herself in the early days of her married life, the jar of discord would have been light. It now promised to be most afflicting in its character.
The first activity of Amanda's newly forming state showed itself in the doing of certain things to which she was inclined, notwithstanding the expression of her husband's disapproval. Accustomed to the most perfect compliance, Mr. Lane was disturbed by this.
"Oh, dear! what a horrid looking thing!" said he one day, as he discovered a new dress pattern which his wife had just purchased lying on a chair. "Where in the world did that come from?"
"I bought it this morning," replied Amanda.
"Take it back, or throw it into the fire," was the husband's rude response.
"I think it neat," said Amanda, smiling.
"Neat? It's awful! But you've no taste. I wish you'd let me buy your dresses."
The wife made no answer to this. Lane said a good deal more about it, to all of which Amanda opposed but little. However, her mind was made up to one thing, and that was to take it to the mantuamaker's. The next Lane saw of the dress was on his wife.
"Oh, mercy!" he exclaimed, holding up his hand, "I thought you had burnt it. Why did you have it made up?"
"I like it," quietly answered Mrs. Lane.
"You like any thing."
"I haven't much taste, I know," said Amanda, "but such as it is, it is pleasant to gratify it sometimes."
Something in the way this remark was made it disturbed the self-satisfaction which was a leading feature in Mr. Lane's state of mind; he, however, answered--"I wish you would be governed by me in matters of this kind; you know my taste is superior to yours. Do take off that dress, and throw it in the fire."
Amanda did not reply to this, for it excited feelings and produced thoughts that she had no wish to manifest. But she did not comply with her husband's wishes. She liked the dress and meant to wear it, and she did wear it, notwithstanding her husband's repeated condemnation of her taste.
At this time they had one child--a babe less than a year old. From the first, Lane had encroached upon the mother's province. This had been felt more sensibly than any thing else by his wife, for it disturbed the harmonious activity of the natural law which gives to a mother the perception of what is best for her infant. Still, she had been so in the habit of yielding to the force of his will, that she gave way to his interference here in numberless instances, though she as often felt that he was wrong as right. Conceit of his own intelligence blinded him to the intelligence of others. Of this Amanda became more and more