'I hate the sight of a kitchen,' she said, 'and I detest thinking about what I must order for meals three times a day. And servants are such hopeless problems; and one is so tied down by housekeeping.'
Of course, with such an attitude of mind, housekeeping became a burden; servants proved inefficient; and the good wife of this bad man found nothing to talk about when her husband came home in the evening but the trouble she had had in the domestic realms.
A new retinue of servants appeared regularly each week, and finally, after a year, the home was given up and the hotel became the retreat of the unfortunate man and wife. She convinced him that she was breaking down under the strain of housekeeping.
A second attempt was made the next year, with the same result, and after the breaking up of that home the wife wanted to go and travel in Europe with another unsatisfied wife whose husband was too busy to accompany her.
So she went away for three months and her husband lived at the club.
When she returned she found the bad man very dissatisfied and inclined to find fault.
He said he wanted a home; he wanted a domestic wife, and he wanted children.
Then the woman who bore his name fell to weeping, and she sobbed out that she was sorry she came home, if he only wanted to scold her and find fault with her; and she declared she was not physically strong enough to become the mother of children. She gravely hinted that she was a victim of some serious malady which would cause her death if she attempted to be a mother—her physician had told her so.
The bad man gave vent to an audible sneer at this juncture. He said he knew all about the doctors who told selfish and unwomanly wives such stories, just to please them and to keep them as his patients. But, he declared, he understood God's laws and the nature of normal human beings well enough to know that not one woman in five hundred, who was able to journey about the world by land and sea, and go sight-seeing and to attend receptions, would in any way endanger her life by becoming a mother if she took any care of herself and desired the child.
Then the wife became very hysterical and went home to her mother, and said her husband had called her all kinds of names; that he had made her homecoming unhappy, and that she could never live with him again. She said he was a coarse brute, who lived wholly in the senses and did not understand a delicate woman.