“Very well, then,” Winn replied. “He has lied to me, and must go. I’ll dismiss him at once. He told me distinctly that you had said I liked them.”
Estelle fidgeted. She didn’t want the gardener to go. She really couldn’t remember what she’d said and what she hadn’t said to him. And Winn was absurd, and how could it matter, and the people next door had hyacinths, and they’d always had them at home!
Winn listened in silence. He didn’t say anything more about the gardener having lied, and he didn’t countermand the hyacinths; only from that moment he ceased to believe a single word his wife said to him. This is discouraging to conversation and was very unfair to Estelle; for she might have told the truth more often if she had not discovered that it made no difference to her husband whether she told it to him or not.
Estelle knew that her heart was broken, but on the whole she did not find that she was greatly inconvenienced.
In an unhappy marriage the woman generally scores unless she is in love with her husband. Estelle never had been in love with Winn; she had had an agreeable feeling about him, and now she had a disagreeable feeling about him, but neither of these emotions could be compared with beaten-brass hot-water jugs, which she had always meant to have when she was married.
If Winn had remained deeply in love with her, besides making things more comfortable at meals it would have been a feather in her cap. Still his cruelty could be turned into another almost more becoming feather.
She said to herself and a little later to the nearest clergyman, “I must make an offering of my sorrow.” She offered it a good deal, almost to every person she met. Even the cook was aware of it; but, like all servants, she unhesitatingly sided with the master. He might be in the wrong, but he was seldom if ever in the kitchen.
They had to have a house and servants, because Estelle felt that marriage without a house was hardly legal; and Winn had given way about it, as he was apt to do about things Estelle wanted. His very cruelty made him particularly generous about money.
But Estelle was never for a moment taken in by his generosity; she saw that it was his way of getting out of being in love with her. Winn was a bad man and had ruined her life — this forced her to supplement her trousseau.
Later on when he put down one of his hunters and sold a polo pony so that she could have a maid, she began to wonder if she had at all found out how bad he really was?