It was the depth of winter.
She lived in a lone house in a thick wood. She had no companion in the house, no acquaintance in the neighborhood, and no correspondent in the world. She never made a visit, or had a visitor, or wrote a letter, or received one. Her one object in life was her husband; her one interest in the day his return at night; and if he had given her a little more of his company, if only an evening now and then, she could have been happy;—or if, when he did come home, he could have been more cheerful in her presence, she would have been less miserable.
But, ah! friends, Alexander—as is always the case with an evil-doer—went on from bad to worse.
And when morning after morning he gulped down his coffee in hot haste, and hurried away from his home, in eager anxiety; and when night after night he returned in the small hours, too cold, tired and harassed to notice the preparations she had made for his comfort, or to share the supper she had kept waiting for him, or even to bestow a kiss or a smile, or a look upon her; when, in fact, he seemed to have become estranged from her; then, indeed, her heart failed, her beauty faded, and she hung her head like a flower drooping in the cold.
She tried very hard to keep up her spirits and preserve her beauty for his sake and for her own. For more than all earthly things she wished to retain his love. And she remembered how in her childhood, he had scolded her for crying, telling her that it made her ugly, and that he could not possibly love an ugly little girl; and how she had almost suffocated herself then, in her efforts to suppress her sobs, lest she should grow ugly and lose his love.
Then he had been a mere thoughtless youth, teasing a timid child who loved him; now he was or seemed a heartless man, torturing a sensitive young woman, who had given her whole life into his hands.
Yet these were not her thoughts of him; she did not blame him even to herself; she was more ingenious in finding excuses for his conduct, than even he would have been. But she was right in trying to be always bright and beautiful, so as to retain his love, since she valued it so highly—for he did dislike ugly and sorrowful faces.
And at length, when her powers of self-control were exhausted—when loneliness, late hours, fatigue of body and distress of mind had done their work upon her heart and frame, and broken down her health and spirits—her pale face, heavy eyes, languid motions and faltering tones irritated him, for they were so many severe, though silent and involuntary reproaches to him.
“As if it were not enough,” he sometimes said to himself, “that for her sake, I have foolishly given up the most beautiful woman of the day, and sacrificed the most brilliant prospects of my life, and worse than all, placed myself in a false and degrading position, but that now, she must make me more miserable still, with her moping manners.”
But here his faithful conscience always rebuked him for his injustice, and awakened his memory to remind him, that his poor young wife herself, child as she was, had at the time of his proposal for her hand, set all these possible regrets before him, and had warned him to pause and reflect, before taking the irrevocable step of making her his wife; and that he himself had been strong to overcome her hesitation and stubborn to maintain his own will.