Pickwick. Mrs. Tutt was tall, spare, capable and sardonic. She made Tutt
comfortable, but she no longer appealed to his sense of romance. Still
she held him. As the playwright hath said "It isn't good looks they
want, but good nature; if a warm welcome won't hold them, cold cream
won't."

However, Tutt got neither looks nor cold cream. His welcome, in fact,
was warm only if he stayed out too late, and then the later the warmer.
His relationship to his wife was prosaic, respectful. In his heart of
hearts he occasionally thought of her as exceedingly unattractive. In a
word Mrs. Tutt performed her wifely functions in a purely matter-of-fact
way. Anything else would have seemed to her unseemly. She dressed in a
manner that would have been regarded as conservative even on Beacon
Hill. She had no intention of making an old fool of herself or of
letting him be one either. When people had been married thirty years
they could take some things for granted. Few persons therefore had ever
observed Mr. Tutt in the act of caressing Mrs. Tutt; and there were
those who said that he never had. Frankly, she was a trifle forbidding:
superficially not the sort of person to excite a great deal of
sentiment; and occasionally, as we have hinted, in the spring Tutt
yearned for a little sentiment.

He did his yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those
hours consecrated to the law. In his wife's society he yearned not at
all. In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language
inside the innermost circle of decorum. At home his talk was entirely
"Yea, yea," and "Nay, nay," and dealt principally with politics and the
feminist movement, in which Abigail was deeply interested.

And by this we do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt