returned with greater vigor.

He leaned back in the coupe and gloomily reflected.

He had been married scarcely a year, yet even in the illusions of
the honeymoon the woman, older than himself, and the widow of his old
patron, had half unconsciously reasserted herself, and slipped back
into the domination of her old position. It was at first pleasant
enough,--this half-maternal protectorate which is apt to mingle even
with the affections of younger women,--and Clarence, in his easy,
half-feminine intuition of the sex, yielded, as the strong are apt to
yield, through the very consciousness of their own superiority. But this
is a quality the weaker are not apt to recognize, and the woman who
has once tasted equal power with her husband not only does not easily
relegate it, but even makes its continuance a test of the affections.
The usual triumphant feminine conclusion, "Then you no longer love me,"
had in Clarence's brief experience gone even further and reached its
inscrutable climax, "Then I no longer love you," although shown only in
a momentary hardening of the eye and voice. And added to this was his
sudden, but confused remembrance that he had seen that eye and heard
that voice in marital altercation during Judge Peyton's life, and that
he himself, her boy partisan, had sympathized with her. Yet, strange to
say, this had given him more pain than her occasional other reversions
to the past--to her old suspicious of him when he was a youthful protege
of her husband and a presumed suitor of her adopted daughter Susy.
High natures are more apt to forgive wrong done to themselves than any
abstract injustice. And her capricious tyranny over her dependents and
servants, or an unreasoning enmity to a neighbor or friend, outraged his
finer sense more than her own misconception of himself. Nor did he dream
that this was a thing most women seldom understand, or, understanding,