In the night, when she was sleeping at my side,—

     I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence.

     Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her—

       Would to God that she or I had died!

 

                                      Confessions¹.

There was a man called Bronckhorst—a three-cornered, middle-aged² man in the Army—gray as a badger³, and, some people said, with a touch of country-blood in him. That, however, cannot be proved. Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger than her husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy eyelids⁴, over weak eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the lights fell on it.

 

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many things—including actual assault with the clenched⁵ fist—that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear—as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore—with a long course of brutal⁶, hard chaff⁷, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gayety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not what she has been, and—worst of all—the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially⁸ dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the

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