odour of bad tobacco and spirits home with him, and naturally her temper
suffers. She knows nothing of love and sympathy; she has no pleasurable
interest in life. Fatigue and worry are succeeded by profound
disheartenment. One can imagine that while she was young, the worn
garments she was wont to mend during those long lonely evenings were often
wet with tears. The dulness must have been deadly, and dulness added to
fatigue time after time ended at last not in tears, but in peevish
irritation, ebullitions of spleen, and ineffectual resistance. The woman
was thoroughly embittered, and the man had to pay the penalty. Whatever
pleasure there might have been in their joint lives he had secured for
himself, leaving her to stagnate for want of a little variety to keep her
feelings flowing wholesomely; and she did stagnate dutifully, but she was
to blame for it. Had she gone out and amused herself with other wives
similarly situated, and had tobacco and beer, if she liked them, every
evening, it would have been better for herself and her husband."

There must have been some system in Evadne's reading, for "The Naggletons"
came immediately after "Mrs. Caudle," and are dismissed curtly enough:

"Vulgar, ill-bred, lower class people," she calls them. "Objectionable to
contemplate from every point of view. But a book which should enlighten
the class whom it describes on the subject of their own bad manners.
_We_ don't nag."

She owed her acquaintance with the next two books she mentions to the
indirect instigation of her father, and she must have read them when she
was about eighteen, and emancipated from schoolroom supervision, but not
yet fairly entered upon the next chapter of her existence; for they are
among the last she notices before she came out.