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“How do I look?” asked the young man, playfully.

“Oh! you look–you look more like a country clod-hopper than any thing else.”

There was a sharpness in Kate’s tones that fell unpleasantly on the ears of the young man.

“Do I, indeed!” was his rather cold remark. Yet he did not change his position.

“Indeed, you do,” said the wife, who was, by this time, beginning to feel a good deal of irritation; for she saw that Frederick was not inclined to respond in the way she had hoped, to her very reasonable desire that he would assume a more graceful attitude. “The fact is,” she continued, impelled to further utterance by the excited state of her feelings, although she was conscious of having already said more than was agreeable to her husband, “you ought to correct yourself of these ungraceful and undignified habits. It shows a want of”–

Kate stopped suddenly. She felt that she was about using words that would inevitably give offence.

“A want of what?” inquired Lee, in a low, firm voice, while he continued to look his young wife steadily in the face.

Kate’s eyes fell to the floor and she remained silent.

“Ungraceful and undignified. Humph!”

Lee was evidently hurt at this allegation, as the tone in which he repeated the words clearly showed.

“Do you call your present attitude graceful?” Kate asked, rallying herself under the reflection that she was right.

“It is comfortable for me; and, therefore, ought to be graceful in your eyes,” was the young man’s perverse answer. Not the slightest change had yet taken place in his position.

This was beyond what the high spirited lady could bear, and she retorted with more feeling than discretion:

“Love is not blind in my case, I can assure you, Frederick, and never will be. You are very ungraceful and untidy, and annoy me, sometimes, excessively. I wish you would try to correct these things.”

“You do?”

There was something cool and provoking in the way Lee said this.

“I do, Frederick, and I’m in earnest.”

The cheeks of Kate were in a glow, and her eyes lit up, and her lips quivering.

“How long since you made the discovery that I was only a country clod-hopper?” said Lee, who was particularly annoyed by Kate’s unexpected charges against his good-breeding.

“I didn’t say you were only a country clod-hopper,” replied Kate.

“I believe you used the words. My ears rarely deceive me. I must own to feeling highly complimented.”

“Do sit up straight, Frederick! Do take your leg from over the arm of that chair! You make me so nervous that I can hardly contain myself.”

“Really! I thought a man was privileged to sit in any position he pleased in his own house.”

The excitement of Kate’s mind had, by this time, reached a crisis. Bursting into tears, she hurried from the room, and went sobbing up to her chamber.

Here was a fine state of affairs, indeed! Was ever a man so perverse and unreasonable?

Did Frederick Lee follow, quickly, his weeping wife? No; his pride was too deeply wounded for that.

“A country clod-hopper! Undignified and ungraceful! Upon my word!” Such were some of his mental ejaculations. And then, as his feelings grew excited, he started up from his chair and began pacing the floor, muttering, as he did so–

“It is rather late in the day to make this discovery! Why didn’t she find it out before? Humph!”

Meanwhile, Kate had thrown herself across her bed, where she lay, weeping bitterly.

What a storm had suddenly been blown about their ears!

It was fully an hour before Frederick Lee’s disturbed feelings began to run at all clear. He was both surprised and offended. What could all this mean? What had all at once come over his young wife?

“A country clod-hopper!” he muttered to himself over and over again. “Ungraceful–ungenteel, and all that! Very complimentary, indeed!”

When Lee joined his wife in their chamber, two hours after she had left him, he found that she had retired to bed and was sleeping.