should have been, increased the
discomfort of the kitchen.

"Oh, that's it!" said Gourlay. "I see! It was want of the fireplace that
kept ye from washing the dishes that we used yestreen. That was
terrible! However, ye'll have plenty of boiling water when I put in the
grand new range for ye; there winna be its equal in the parish! We'll
maybe have a clean house _than_."

Mrs. Gourlay leaned, with the outspread thumb and red raw knuckles of
her right hand, on the sloppy table, and gazed away through the back
window of the kitchen in a kind of mournful vacancy. Always when her
first complaining defence had failed to turn aside her husband's tongue,
her mind became a blank beneath his heavy sarcasms, and sought refuge by
drifting far away. She would fix her eyes on the distance in dreary
contemplation, and her mind would follow her eyes in a vacant and
wistful regard. The preoccupation of her mournful gaze enabled her to
meet her husband's sneers with a kind of numb, unheeding acquiescence.
She scarcely heard them.

Her head hung a little to one side as if too heavy for her wilting neck.
Her hair, of a dry, red brown, curved low on either side of her brow, in
a thick, untidy mass, to her almost transparent ears. As she gazed in
weary and dreary absorption her lips had fallen heavy and relaxed, in
unison with her mood; and through her open mouth her breathing was
quick, and short, and noiseless. She wore no stays, and her slack cotton
blouse showed the flatness of her bosom, and the faint outlines of her
withered and pendulous breasts hanging low within.

There was something tragic in her pose, as she stood, sad and
abstracted, by the dirty table. She was scraggy helplessness, staring
in sorrowful vacancy. But Gourlay eyed her with disgust. Why, by Heaven,
even now her petticoat was gaping behind, worse than the sloven's at the
Red Lion. She was a pr-r-retty wife for John Gourlay! The sight of her
feebleness would have roused pity in some: Gourlay it moved to a steady
and seething rage. As she stood helpless before him he stung her with
crude, brief irony.

Yet he was not wilfully cruel; only a stupid man with a strong
character, in which he took a dogged pride. Stupidity and pride provoked
the brute in him. He was so dull--only dull is hardly the word for a man
of his smouldering fire--he was so dour of wit that he could never hope
to distinguish himself by anything in the shape of cleverness. Yet so
resolute a man