It must be injustice, decided Cherry.  For Martin seemed to her less clever, less just, less intelligent, and less generous than the average man of her acquaintance.  And yet he did not seem to impress other people in the way he impressed her.

He was extraordinarily healthy, and had small sympathy for illness, weakness, for the unfortunate, and the complaining.  He was scrupulously clean, and Cherry added that to his credit, although the necessity of seeing that Martin’s bath, Martin’s shaving water, and Martin’s clean linen were ready complicated her duties somewhat.  He was not interested in the affairs of the day; politics, reforms, world movements generally found him indifferent, but he would occasionally favour his wife with a sudden opinion as to China or intensive farming or Lloyd’s shipping.  She knew when he did this that he was quoting.  He whistled over his dressing, read the paper at breakfast, and was gone.  At noon he rushed in, always late, devoured his lunch appreciatively, and was gone again.  At night he was usually tired, inclined to quarrel about small matters, inclined to disapprove of the new positions of the bedroom furniture, or the way Cherry’s hair was dressed.

He loved to play poker and was hospitable to a certain extent.  He would whistle and joke over the preparations for a rarebit after a game, and would willingly walk five blocks for beer if Cherry had forgotten to get it.  On Sunday he liked to see her prettily gowned; now and then they motored with his friends from the mine; more often walked, ate a hearty chicken dinner, and went to a cold supper in the neighbourhood, with “Five Hundred” to follow.  At ten their hostess would flutter into her kitchen; there would be lemonade and beer and rich layer cake.  Then the men would begin to match poker hands, and the women to discuss babies in low tones.

Cherry never saw her husband so animated or so interested as when men he had known before chanced to drift into town, mining men from Nevada or from El Nido, or men he had known in college.  They would discuss personalities, would shout over recollected good times, would slap each other on the back and laugh tirelessly.

She thought him an extremely difficult man to live with, and was angered when her hints to this effect led him to remark that she was the “limit.”  They had a serious quarrel one day, when he told her that she was the most selfish and spoiled woman he had ever known.  He called her attention to the other women of the town, busy, contented women, sending children off to school, settling babies down for naps in sunny dooryards, cooking and laughing and hurrying to and fro.

“Yes, and look at them!” Cherry said with ready tears.  “Shabby, thin, tired all the time!”

“The trouble with you is,” Martin said, departing, “you’ve been told that you’re pretty and sweet all your life—­and you’re spoiled!  You are pretty, yes—­” he added, more mildly.  “But, by George, you sulk so much, and you crab so much, that I’m darned if I see it any more!  All I see is trouble!”