of a home which was no home, this married sister would gladly take the little boy into her motherly care.  He had never dared to propose the step; but Ada might perchance give ready assent to it, even now.  For motherhood she had no single qualification but the physical.  Before her child’s coming into the world, she snarled at the restraints it imposed upon her; at its birth, she clamoured against nature for the pains she had to undergo, and hated her husband because he was the intermediate cause of them.  The helpless infant gave her no pleasure, touched no emotion in her heart, save when she saw it in the nurse’s care, and received female compliments upon its beauty.  She rejected it at night because it broke her sleep; in the day, because she could not handle it without making it cry.  When Peachey remonstrated with her, she stared in insolent surprise, and wished that he had had to suffer all her hardships of the past year.

Peachey could not be said to have any leisure.  On returning from business he was involved forthwith in domestic troubles and broils, which consumed the dreary evening, and invaded even his sleep.  Thus it happened that at long intervals he was tempted, instead of going home to dinner, to spend a couple of hours at a certain small eating-house, a resort of his bachelor days, where he could read the newspapers, have a well-cooked chop in quietude, and afterwards, if acquaintances were here, play a game of chess.  Of course he had to shield this modest dissipation with a flat falsehood, alleging to his wife that business had kept him late.  Thus on an evening of June, when the soft air and the mellow sunlight overcame him with a longing for rest, he despatched a telegram to De Crespigny Park, and strolled quietly about the streets until the hour and his appetite pointed him tablewards.  The pity of it was that he could not dismiss anxieties; he loathed the coward falsehood, and thought more of home than of his present freedom.  But at least Ada’s tongue was silent.

He seated himself in the familiar corner, and turned over illustrated papers, whilst his chop hissed on the grid.  Ah, if he were but unmarried, what a life he might make for himself now that the day’s labour brought its ample reward!  He would have rooms in London, and a still, clean lodging somewhere among the lanes and fields.  His ideals expressed the homeliness of the man.  On intellect he could not pride himself; his education had been but of the ‘commercial’ order; he liked to meditate rather than to read; questions of the day concerned him not at all.  A weak man, but of clean and kindly instincts.  In mercantile life he had succeeded by virtue of his intensely methodical habits—­the characteristic which made him suffer so from his wife’s indolence, incapacity, and vicious ill-humour.

Before his marriage he had thought of women as domestic beings.  A wife was the genius of home.  He knew men who thanked their wives for all the prosperity and content that they enjoyed.  Others he knew who told quite a different tale, but these surely were sorrowful exceptions.  Nowadays he saw the matter in a light of fuller experience.  In his rank of life married happiness was a rare thing, and the fault could generally be traced to wives who had no sense of responsibility, no understanding of household duties, no love of simple pleasures, no religion.