In the autumn, while all this was going on, I received a painful and
wretched letter from Letty Malden, begging me to come to her. I could not
resist such an appeal; and one of Josephine's little nieces having come to
spend the winter with her, I hurried to Slepington,--not, I am sure, in
the least regretted by Mr. Waring, who had begun to look at me with uneasy
and sometimes defiant eyes.
I found a miserable household here. Mr. Malden had in no way reformed.
When did marriage ever reform a bad man? On the contrary, he was more
dissipated than ever; and whenever he came home, the welcome that waited
for him was one little calculated to make home pleasant; for Letty's quick
temper blazed up in reproach and reviling that drew out worse
recrimination; and even the little, wailing, feeble baby, that filled
Letty's arms and consoled her in his absence, was only further cause of
strife between her and her husband. Often, as I came down the street and
saw the pretty outside of the cottage, waving with creepers, and hedged
about with thorns, whose gay berries decked it as if for a festival, I
thought of what a good old preacher among the Friends once said to me:
"Sarah, thee will live to find shows are often seems; thee sees many a
quiet house, with gay windows, that is hell inside.
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