worked not for himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser contamination of money.  For he seemed to think of himself so little, that after three months in his house, Gabriella was still ignorant of his interests apart from his work, except, of course, his absorbing interest in the morning papers.  From the time he got up at seven o’clock until he went to bed punctually on the stroke of ten, he appeared to order his life with the single purpose of giving as little trouble as was compatible with living at all.  His tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate two eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an occasional visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have absolutely no recreation.  His life was in the stock market, and it was a life of almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice.  If he had any pleasure, except the pleasure of providing his wife with the money for her dinner parties, which bored him excruciatingly, Gabriella had never discovered it.  “He asks so little for himself that it is pathetic,” she remarked to George one night, when Mr. Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the evening papers to bed with him.

“Oh, well, he gets what he asks for,” retorted George indifferently, “and that’s more than the rest of us can say.”

George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that she expected a child in the autumn.  All her efforts to soothe had merely exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a fit of nervous irritability.  After four months of marriage prolonged boredom had replaced the passionate tenderness of their honeymoon.  Why this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand.  She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing condition of health.  Every evening, except when there were guests, he spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled with complaint about the number and the size of his bills.  He treated these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him.  As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper weight on the little white and gold desk.