they'd always had them at home!

Winn listened in silence. He didn't say anything more about the gardener
having lied, and he didn't countermand the hyacinths; only from that
moment he ceased to believe a single word his wife said to him. This is
discouraging to conversation and was very unfair to Estelle; for she
might have told the truth more often if she had not discovered that it
made no difference to her husband whether she told it to him or not.

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 i