Home, to the man of science, was only a place where the torch of mind was to be re-lighted; his wife, a being who fed it with oil, and her house the mere laboratory used for those supplies of a physical nature which made the ethereal flame burn purer and brighter.
What a pity it is that all who are destined to play the part of cyphers have not a taste for nonentity! Mrs. Daley, as she often told her husband, who, however, had not once seemed to hear the remark, “never dreamed before her marriage that it would come to this.” To be sure he had been a different man as a lover, but it is one of the standing wonders of the world how the wise and great ever condescended to the foolishness of courting; yet philosophers in love are always lamentably absent, and being quite out of their element, flounder away more boisterously than any other kind of fish, but marriage puts them again at ease, and then their cold blood creeps on uninterrupted in its sluggish course.
“Old maid or not old maid,” again passed through Ariana’s mind as her eyes rested on Mr. Daley’s boots, which, in their turn, rested upon the marble mantelpiece.
“Literary men are I presume all just such bears, and men of business like Andrew.” Single-blessedness would have carried the day had not the most finical of her maiden acquaintance arisen to efface the images of the brothers-in-law.
“Do these old books make you happy, Madison Daley?” she asked, when her sister was quite exhausted with the relation of her grievances. The Professor had been caught looking up at the cessation of the sound of his wife’s tongue, which he seemed to have imagined was to be perpetual.
One cannot pretend to deafness as easily when they meet the eye of a questioner, and a cold “Yes,” fell from the thin lips of the philosopher. He instantly resumed reading a “Treatise upon the promotion of individual happiness, as the only certain way of enhancing national prosperity.”
It was a lucky thing for Ariana, that with her quick perception of character she had so strong a love for the ludicrous, for what otherwise might have aroused her indignation now only excited her mirth. The incongruity between Professor Daley’s philanthropic studies and his habitual selfishness, struck her as so droll that she burst into a merry peal of laughter. The astonished glance of the Professor at this sudden merriment said quite plainly, “Is the girl demented?” and Jane’s querulous voice, still more audibly,