"And now! Henrietta, just tell me the utmost you have to allege against
my wife. That Sir Edwin was known to her father and herself, of which
acquaintance she never told her husband; that she has accidently met
him since a few times; and that he has been rude enough to address a
letter to her--where is it?"
It was lying on the table, for Phillis, in her precipitate disappearance,
had forgotten it. Dr. Grey put it into his pocket unopened.
"Well, Aunt Henrietta, is that all? Have you any more to say, any thing
else of which to accuse my wife? Say it all out, only remember one
thing, that you are saying it to a man, and about his wife."
Brief as the words were, they implied volumes--all that Dr. Grey was,
and every honest man should be, toward his wife, whom he has taken to
himself, to cherish and protect, if necessary, against the whole world--
everything for which the bond of marriage was ordained, to be
maintained unannulled by time, or change, or faultiness, perhaps even
actual sin. One has heard of such guardianship--of a husband pitying
and protecting till death a wife who had sinned against him; and if
possible to any man, this would have been possible to one like Arnold
Grey.
But in his manner was not only protection, there was also love--the sort
of' love which passionate youth can seldom understand; but Paul the
apostle did, unmarried though he was, when he spoke in such mystical
language of a husband's "nourishing and cherishing" his wife "as the
Lord the Church.
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