"In practice, men command and women disobey them; men bully and women lie.

But in truth, Eveena, having a wife only too loyal and too loving, I don't care to canvass the deserts of ordinary women or the discipline of other households.

I own that it was wrong to scold you.

Do not insist on making me say that it would have been a little less wrong to beat you!" She laughed--her low, sweet, silvery laugh, the like of which I have hardly heard among Earthly women, even of the simpler, more child-like races of the East and South; a laugh still stranger in a world where childhood is seldom bright and womanhood mostly sad and fretful.

Of the very few satisfactory memories I bore away from that world, the sweetest is the recollection of that laugh, which I heard for the first time on the morrow of our bridals, and for the last time on the day before we parted.