But nothing of this kind ever happened, and when one dreary night after grumbling at the servants, cursing his fate and abusing everybody and everything, he put on his hat and went out saying he had "better have married Lena [the other woman] after all," for in that case he would have had "some sort of society anyway," the revulsion I had felt on the night of my marriage came sweeping over me like a wave of the sea, and I asked myself again, "What's the good? What's the good?"
FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER
Nevertheless next day I found myself taking my husband's side against myself.
If he had sacrificed anything in order to marry me it was my duty to make it up to him.
I resolved that I should make it up to him. I would study my husband's likes and dislikes in every little thing. I would share in his pleasures and enter into his life. I would show him that a wife was something other and better than any hired woman in the world, and that when she cast in her lot with her husband it was for his own sake only and not for any fortune he could spend on her.
"Yes, yes, that's what I'll do," I thought, and I became more solicitous of my husband's happiness than if I had really and truly loved him.
A woman would smile at the efforts which I made in my inexperience to make my husband forget his cast-off mistress, and indeed some of them were very childish.
The first was a ridiculous failure.
My husband's birthday was approaching and I wished to make him a present. It was difficult to know what to select, for I knew little or nothing of his tastes or wants; but walking one day in a street off Oxford Street I saw, in the window of a shop for the sale of objects of ecclesiastical vertu, among crosses and crucifixes and rosaries, a little ivory ink-stand and paper-holder, which was surmounted by a figure of the Virgin.