"'Leading and improving! teaching and tutoring! bearing and forbearing! Pah! My husband is not to be my baby. I am not to set him his daily lesson and see that he learns it, and give him a sugar-plum if he is good, and a patient, pensive, pathetic lecture if he is bad. But it is like a tutor to talk of the "satisfaction of teaching"—I suppose you think it the finest employment in the world. I don't—I reject it. Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or else we part.'
"'God knows it is needed!'
"'What do you mean by that, Mr. Moore?'
"'What I say. Improvement is imperatively needed.'
"'If you were a woman you would school Monsieur, votre mari, charmingly: it would just suit you; schooling is your vocation.'
"'May I ask whether, in your present just and gentle mood, you mean to taunt me with being a tutor?'
"'Yes—bitterly; and with anything else you please: any defect of which you are painfully conscious.'
"'With being poor, for instance?'
"'Of course; that will sting you; you are sore about your poverty: you brood over that.'
"'With having nothing but a very plain person to offer the woman who may master my heart?'
"'Exactly. You have a habit of calling yourself plain. You are sensitive about the cut of your features, because they are not quite on an Apollo-
