d
have borne with his impatience and struggled on.

But nothing of this kind ever happened, and when one dreary night after
grumbling at the servants, cursing his fate and abusing everybody and
everything, he put on his hat and went out saying he had "better have
married Lena [the other woman] after all," for in that case he would
have had "some sort of society anyway," the revulsion I had felt on the
night of my marriage came sweeping over me like a wave of the sea, and I
asked myself again, "What's the good? What's the good?"

FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER

Nevertheless next day I found myself taking my husband's side against
myself.

If he had sacrificed anything in order to marry me it was my duty to
make it up to him.

I resolved that I _should_ make it up to him. I would study my husband's
likes and dislikes in every little thing. I would share in his pleasures
and enter into his life. I would show him that a wife was something
other and better than any hired woman in the world, and that when she
cast in her lot with her husband it was for his own sake only and not
for any fortune he could spend on her.

"Yes, yes, that's what I'll do," I thought, and I became more solicitous
of my husband's happiness than if I had really and truly loved him.

A woman would smile at the efforts which I made in my inexperience to
make my husband forget his cast-off mistress, and indeed some of them
were very childish.

The first was a ridiculous failure.

My husband's birthday was approaching and I wished to make him a
present. It was difficult to know what to select, for I knew little or
nothing of his tastes or wants; but walking one day in a street off
Oxford Street I saw, in the window of a shop for the sale of objects of
ecclesiastical _vertu_, among crosses and crucifixes and rosaries, a
little ivory ink-stand and paper-holder, which was surmounted by a
figure of the Virgin.

I cannot for the life of me conceive why I thought this would be a
suitable present for my husband, except that the face of Our Lady was so
young, so sweet, so beautiful, and so exquisitely feminine that it
seemed impossible that any man in the world should not love her. But
however that might be I bought her, and carrying her home in a cab, I
set her on my husband's desk without a word, and then stood by, like the
mother of Moses, to watch the result.

There was no result--at first at all events. My husband was several
hours in the room wi