``I suppose I deserve my fate,'' said she. ``When a
woman marries beneath her she must expect insult and
low conversation.''

``You must cure your feet,'' said he. ``I'll not live
in the house with a person who is made fiendish by corns.
I think it's only corns. I see no signs of bunions.''

``You brute!'' cried his wife, rushing from the room.

But when they met again, he at once resumed the
subject, telling her just how she could cure herself--and
he kept on telling her, she apparently ignoring but
secretly acting on his advice. He knew what he was
about, and her feet grew better, grew well--and she
was happier than she had been since girlhood when she
began ruining her feet with tight shoes.

Six months after the marriage, Presbury and his wife
were getting on about as comfortably as it is given to
average humanity to get on in this world of incessant
struggle between uncomfortable man and his uncomfortable
environment. But Mildred had become more
and more unhappy. Her mother, sometimes angrily,
again reproachfully--and that was far harder to bear
--blamed her for ``my miserable marriage to this low,
quarrelsome brute.'' Presbury let no day pass without
telling her openly that she was a beggar living off him,
that she would better marry soon or he would take drastic