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?
There was one point he never yielded; he firmly intended to rejoin his regiment in March.
The station to which they would have to go was five thousand feet up, lonely, healthy, and quite unfashionable. Winn had tried to make it seem jolly to her and had mentioned as a recommendation apparently that it was the kind of place in which you needn't wear gloves. It was close to the border, and women had to be a little careful where they rode.
Estelle had every intention of being careful; she would, she thought, be too careful ever to go to the Indian frontier at all. She had often heard of the tragic separations of Anglo-Indian marriages; it was true that they were generally caused by illness and children, but there must be other methods of obtaining the same immunities.