Although within a few months Enid’s car travelled more than two thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said that she neglected her house for reform.  Whether she neglected her husband depended upon one’s conception of what was his due.  When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not happy.  And Claude himself wondered.  If his marriage disappointed him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and make the best of what was good in it.  If his wife didn’t love him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another thing to her.  She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.  Everything about a man’s embrace was distasteful to Enid; something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,—­ for Eve’s transgression, perhaps.

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?