attractions appealed to him, his wife's early evidences of implacable
jealousy would have proven a sure antidote. He was an unconscious
slave. Her nervousness expressed itself toward him in other terms than
convulsively. She had a tongue which from time to time blistered the
poor man. He would never talk back, fearful as he ever was of bringing
on one of those storms which, in his inadequate medical knowledge,
were as mysterious and ominous as epileptic attacks.

For years the absence of children in the home was a sorrow from which
much affecting sentimentality evolved, being as well the pathetic
cause for days of sickness, when outside interests were less
attractive to this artful sufferer than the attentions elicited by her
illness. Then out of the great gulf surged the heroic Galveston
tragedy, and the two orphan children came to fill the idealized want.
At first they received an abundance of impulsive loving, but unhappily
one day, a few months after they came, the foster-mother overheard the
elder girl make an unfavorable comparison between her and the real
mother; and for years distinctions were made--the younger being always
favored, the unfortunate, older child living half-terrorized, never
knowing when angry, unfair words would assail her.

Lena Platt had confided to several of her bosom friends the tragedy of
her unequal marriage and that she knew she would yet find a "soul
mate." There was a Choral Society in Houston one winter, and following
a few gratuitous compliments from the dapper young director, she
decided she had found it. He left in the spring and this dream faded.
A few months later the new minister's incautious exaggeration that "he
didn't know how he could run the church without her" came near
resulting in trouble, for some of the good sisters unkindly questioned
the quality of her sudden excessive devotion and religious zeal. Mrs.