It was at first pleasant enough,--this half-maternal protectorate which is apt to mingle even with the affections of younger women,--and Clarence, in his easy, half-feminine intuition of the sex, yielded, as the strong are apt to yield, through the very consciousness of their own superiority.

But this is a quality the weaker are not apt to recognize, and the woman who has once tasted equal power with her husband not only does not easily relegate it, but even makes its continuance a test of the affections.
The usual triumphant feminine conclusion, "Then you no longer love me," had in Clarence's brief experience gone even further and reached its inscrutable climax, "Then I no longer love you," although shown only in a momentary hardening of the eye and voice.

And added to this was his sudden, but confused remembrance that he had seen that eye and heard that voice in marital altercation during Judge Peyton's life, and that he himself, her boy partisan, had sympathized with her.

Yet, strange to say, this had given him more pain than her occasional other reversions to the past--to her old suspicious of him when he was a youthful protege of her husband and a presumed suitor of her adopted daughter Susy.
High natures are more apt to forgive wrong done to themselves than any abstract injustice.

And her capricious tyranny over her dependents and servants, or an unreasoning enmity to a neighbor or friend, outraged his finer sense more than her own misconception of himself.