The bald patch glistened on the top of his head, and he was breathing heavily as he read his newspaper.
He had always been rather distasteful to her physically, and although the continuous, degradingly inevitable proximity of married life in a small suburban villa had hardened her into indifference, Elsie was still averse from the more intimate aspects of marriage with him.
She wished that she could fall in love, remembering that Madame Clara had said: “I see love here—love that you have never known yet.”
“That’s bunkum,” thought Elsie. “I’ve been in love heaps of times—I was in love with that doctor fellow, Woolley. It doesn’t last, that’s all.”
She hardly ever met any men nowadays, as she resentfully reminded herself.
The husbands of her married friends were at work all day, and if she occasionally met them at their wives’ card-parties, they did not interest her very greatly. Most of the wives distrusted the husbands and gave them no opportunity for flirtation with other women. And Horace Williams himself was a jealous man, always suspicious, and never allowed his young wife to go anywhere with any man but himself.
Elsie had been for a long while in inward revolt against the dullness of her life. She remembered with longing the old days of her girlhood, when every walk had been the prelude to adventure, and the casual kisses of unknown, or scarcely known, men had roused her to rapture.
Nowadays, she knew very well that she would be less easily satisfied. The apathy that had been creeping over her ever since her marriage had to a certain extent lessened the force of the animal magnetism by which she had been able to lure the senses of almost every man she met, and for the first time she was beginning to have doubts of her own attractiveness.
Elsie gave a sigh that was almost a groan.
Williams neither stirred nor raised his eyes.