rn them into positive wounds. If he were going to
send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before
lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of
little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until
they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last
saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not
quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in
disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this
neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said
to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning
them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as
anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to
Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had
broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the
picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?
Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical
presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with
concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow
forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,
repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...
and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of
telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which
he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the
sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious
charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all
other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation
on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection
of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,
too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which
he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore
uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with
his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he
looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always
overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner
for him, he would say something quite ju