The end of the honeymoon saw Mrs. Theobald the most devotedly
obsequious wife in all England. According to the old saying,
Theobald had killed the cat at the beginning. It had been a very
little cat, a mere kitten in fact, or he might have been afraid to
face it, but such as it had been he had challenged it to mortal
combat, and had held up its dripping head defiantly before his
wife's face. The rest had been easy.
Strange that one whom I have described hitherto as so timid and
easily put upon should prove such a Tartar all of a sudden on the
day of his marriage. Perhaps I have passed over his years of courtship
too rapidly. During these he had become a tutor of his college, and
had at last been Junior Dean. I never yet knew a man whose sense of
his own importance did not become adequately developed after he had
held a resident fellowship for five or six years. True- immediately on
arriving within a ten-mile radius of his father's house, an
enchantment fell upon him, so that his knees waxed weak, his greatness
departed, and he again felt himself like an overgrown baby under a
perpetual cloud; but then he was not often at Elmhurst, and as soon as
he left it the spell was taken off again; once more he became the
fellow and tutor of his college, the Junior Dean, the betrothed of
Christina, the idol of the Allaby womankind.
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