Scheherazade by Florence Warden

At dinner at Maple Lodge on the evening of their arrival, George Lauriston and his wife met the gentle Dicky Wood, who had come down the day before, and spent the afternoon riding with the son of Sir Henry's steward. Nouna was much pleased by this compliance with her wishes, and showed her appreciation of it by flirting very prettily at dinner with the young guardsman. Later in the evening she held in the verandah a little court, and chanted them some half-wild, half-monotonous Indian songs in a tiny thread of sweet voice, with some plaintive low notes that lived in the memory. And George, who was standing with Ella some yards away from the rest of the group, felt thrilled through and through by the weird melodies, and liked to fancy that in these native songs of hers the soul-voice, that, in the tumultuous life of emotions and sensations in which she found her happiness, had small opportunity to be heard, forced up its little note and promised a richer fulness of melody by and by.

It was not by the man's choice, but the girl's, that he and Ella found themselves together. At the present time there was only one woman in Lauriston's world, and in his absorption in his wife the ungrateful fellow was incapable even of feeling his old friendly pleasure in Ella's society. Her interest in him, on the other hand, as is the way with that splendid institution for the comfort and consolation of man -- plain women, had grown tenfold stronger since he had lowered himself to the usual dead level of his foolish sex, by marrying through his eyes. To Ella this downfall was quite tragic; she had thought and hoped so much for him; he had feeling, sense, ambition, was, in fact, not the mere beautifully turned out figure-head of a man who, under various disguises of light or dark complexion, slim or heavy build, was continually saying to her the same commonplaces, betraying to her the same idea-less vacuity, at dinner, ball, and garden-party. Yet here he was, bound for life, and by his own choice, to a beautiful pet animal, with all the fascinating ways of a kitten, who could gambol and scratch, and bask in warmth and shiver in cold, and whom nevertheless he undoubtedly worshipped. Ella, whose mind was of an intellectual cast, and in whom the passions had as yet only developed in an ardent but hazy adoration of dead-and-gone heroes, very naturally underrated the strength of one side of a man's nature, and was cast down when the creature whose sympathetic comprehension of her highest aspirations had made her raise him to a demi-god proved to be in truth only a very man. She fancied, poor child, that he showed deterioration already; when she reminded him at dinner that she had not yet returned a book of Emerson's he had lent her, George laughed carelessly, and said he had forgotten all about it.