me stung him,
and at length made him almost bitter against her.

In this way came about his extraordinary outbreak that night when
Cecily had been alone to her aunt's. Pent-up irritation drove him into
the extravagances which to Cecily were at first incredible. He could
not utter what was really in his mind, and the charges he made against
her were modes of relieving himself. Yet, as soon as they had once
taken shape, these rebukes obtained a real significance of their own.
Coincident with Cecily's disappointment in him had been the sudden
exhibition of her pleasure in society. Under other circumstances, his
wife's brilliancy among strangers might have been pleasurable to Elgar.
His faith in her was perfect, and jealousy of the ignobler kind came
not near him. But he felt that she was taking refuge from the dulness
of her home; he imagined people speaking of him as "the husband of Mrs.
Elgar;" it exasperated him to think of her talking with clever men who
must necessarily suggest comparisons to her.

He himself was not the kind of man who shines in company. He had never
been trained to social usages, and he could not feel at ease in any
drawing-room but his own. The Bohemianism of his early life had even
given him a positive distaste for social obligations and formalities.
Among men of his own way of thinking, he could talk vigorously, and as
a rule keep the lead in conversation; but where restraint in phrase was
needful, he easily became flaccid, and the feeling that he did not show
to advantage filled him with disgust. So there was little chance of his
ever winning that sort of reputation which would have enabled him to
accompany his wife into society without the galling sense of playing an
inferior _role_.

In the matter of Mrs. Travis, he was conscious of his own
arbitrariness, but, having once committed himself to a point of view,
he could not withdraw from it. He had to find fault with his wife and
her society, and here was an obvious resource. Its very obviousness
should, of course, have warned him away, but his reason for attacking
Mrs. Travis had an intimate connection with the general causes of his
discontent. Disguise it how he might, he was simply in the position of
a husband who fears that his authority over his wife is weakening. Mrs.
Travis, as he knew, was a rebel against her own husband--no matter the
cause. She would fill Cecily's mind with sympathetic indignation; the
effect would be to make Cecily