Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own
honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of
the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and
comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in
their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age,
when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to
them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty,
fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and
benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same
circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other, in their
absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. "Do
you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after
having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon
husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have
been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first
year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better
and better just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem
a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"--she
put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement little
push--"there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the
proceedings.
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