the face of disaster. It is a great mistake to limit the ravages of that
guilty passion to the domain of professional emulation. When it is deep,
it does not alone attack the qualities of the person, but the person
himself, and it was thus that Lydia envied Lincoln. Perhaps the analysis
of this sentiment, very subtle in its ugliness, will explain to some a
few of the antipathies against which they have struck in their relatives.
For it is not only between husband and wife that these unavowed envies
are met, it is between lover and mistress, friend and friend, brother and
brother, sometimes, alas, father and son, mother and daughter! Lydia had
married Lincoln Maitland partly out of obedience to her brother's wishes,
partly from vanity, because the young man was an American, and because it
was a sort of victory over the prejudices of race, of which she thought
constantly, but of which she never spoke.

It required only three months of married life to perceive that Maitland
could not forgive himself for that marriage. Although he affected to
scorn his compatriots, and although at heart he did not share any of the
views of the country in which he had not set foot since his fifth year,
he could not hear remarks made in New York upon that marriage without a
pang. He disliked Lydia for the humiliation, and she felt it. The birth
of a child would no doubt have modified that feeling, and, if it would
not have removed it, would at least have softened the embittered heart of
the young wife. But no child was born to them. They had not returned
from their wedding tour, upon which Florent accompanied them, before
their lives rolled along in that silence which forms the base of all
those households in which husband and wife, according to a simple and
grand expression of the people, do not live heart against heart.

After the journey through Spain, which should have been one continued
enchantment, the wife became jealous of the evident preference which