erhaps.

This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of
any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude
before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a
readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in
exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that
for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient
with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not
understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting
remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went
over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in
the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.

Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself,
"It's the end of everything for me." Other men than he must have
been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a
lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy because he was an
idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that
it might be otherwise.

Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright
summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but
broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, but even more
in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid
could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At
such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging
hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.

In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why
she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace
and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful
attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he
came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head
drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity
which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in
him? Was it, after all, his fault?

Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one
else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every
day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came
out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid's
vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the
Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.
Bayliss had a social as well as a hygie