Bow
Street, and policemen, and the newspaper reporters, have cognisance and a
certain jurisdiction over these vulgar matrimonial crimes; but in politer
company how many murderous assaults are there by husband or wife--where
the woman is not felled by the actual fist, though she staggers and sinks
under blows quite as cruel and effectual; where, with old wounds yet
unhealed, which she strives to hide under a smiling face from the world,
she has to bear up and to be stricken down and to rise to her feet again,
under fresh daily strokes of torture; where the husband, fond and
faithful, has to suffer slights, coldness, insult, desertion, his
children sneered away from their love for him, his friends driven from
his door by jealousy, his happiness strangled, his whole life embittered,
poisoned, destroyed! If you were acquainted with the history of every
family in your street, don't you know that in two or three of the houses
there such tragedies have been playing? Is not the young mistress of
Number 20 already pining at her husband's desertion? The kind master of
Number 30 racking his fevered brains and toiling through sleepless nights
to pay for the jewels on his wife's neck, and the carriage out of which
she ogles Lothario in the Park? The fate under which man or woman falls,
blow of brutal tyranny, heartless desertion, weight of domestic care too
heavy to bear--are not blows such as these constantly striking people
down? In this long parenthesis we are wandering ever so far away from M.
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