the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt.

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost
of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a long description of
the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had
not met since Isabel's return from Europe and renewal of her engagement.
Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease
all that she had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and
exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit
after their marriage. And now that they had come together, their only
talk; was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands
could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme.
Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own
honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of
the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and
comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in
their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age,
when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to
them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty,
fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and
benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same
circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other, in their
absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. "Do
you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after
having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon
husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have
been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first
year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better
and better just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem
a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"--she