inclination, or more charming in form, than my wife."

True, this was for the public; but not so were these daily notes; and
these carry to her his assurance that she is "the beautifullest object in
the world. I know no happiness in this life in any degree comparable to
the pleasure I have in your person and society." "But indeed, though you
have every perfection, you have an extravagant fault, which almost
frustrates the good in you to me; and that is, that you do not love to
dress, to appear, to shine out, even at my request, and to make me proud
of you, or rather to indulge the pride I have that you are mine." The
correction of the phrase is finely considerate.

Prue cannot have been a dull wife, for this last compliment is a reply,
full of polite alacrity, to a letter from her asking for a little
flattery. How assiduously, and with what a civilized absence of
uncouthness, of shame-facedness, and of slang of the mind, with what
simplicity, alertness, and finish, does he step out at her invitation,
and perform! She wanted a compliment, though they had been long married
then, and he immediately turned it. This was no dowdy Prue.

Her request, by the way, which he repeats in obeying it, is one of the
few instances of the other side of the correspondence--one of the few
direct echoes of that one of the two voices which is silent.

The ceremony of the letters and the deferent method of address and
signature are never dropped in this most intimate of letter-writing. It
is not a little depressing to think that in this very form and state is
supposed, by the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of the husband
of farce, the "rogue." One does not like the word. Is it not clownish
to apply it with intention to the husband of Prue? He did not pay, he