A torrent of injustice and unreasonableness flows over him for two long hours, and he wonders what the woman will profit, after she has made him burst a blood-vessel; he groans in anguish, "Ah, how hard life seems to me to bear! How many a time would I accept the end of it with joy!"[198] So sharp are the goads in a divided house; so sorely, with ache and smart and deep-welling tears, do men and women rend into shreds the fine web of one another's lives.

But the pity of it, O the pity of it! There are many brighter intervals which make one willing to suppose that if the wife had been a little more patient, more tolerant, more cheerful, less severely addicted to her sterile superstition, there might have been somewhat more happiness in the house.

One misery of the present social ideal of women is that, while it keeps them so systematically ignorant, superstitious, and narrow, it leaves them without humility.

"Be content," said the great John Wesley to his froward wife, "be content to be a private insignificant person, known and loved by God and me.

Of what importance is your character to mankind?
If you was buried just now, or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God ?" This energetic remonstrance can hardly be said to exhaust the matter.