midated me, led to some painful humiliations. First he
laughed, next he sneered, then he snapped me up in the midst of my
explanations and apologies, and finally, at a moment of loss, he broke
out on me with brutal derision, saying he had never had much opinion of
my intellect, but was now quite sure that I had no more brains than a
rabbit and could not say Boo to a goose.

One day when we were alone, and he was lying on the couch with his
vicious little terrier by his side, I offered to sing to him.
Remembering how my voice had been praised, I thought it would be
pleasant to my husband to see that there was something I really could
do. But nine years in a convent had left me with next to no music but
memories of the long-breathed harmonies of some of the beautiful masses
of our Church, and hardly had I begun on these when my husband cried:

"Oh, stop, stop, for heaven's sake stop, or I shall think we're
attending a funeral."

Another day I offered to read to him. The Reverend Mother used to say I
was the best reader she had ever heard, but perhaps it was not
altogether my husband's fault if he formed a different opinion. And
indeed I cannot but think that the holy saints themselves would have
laughed if they had heard me reading aloud, in the voice and intonation
which I had assumed for the meditations of St. Francis of Assisi, the
mystic allusions to "certs," and "bookies," and "punters," and "evens,"
and "scratchings," which formed the substance of the sporting journals
that were my husband's only literature.

"Oh, stop it, stop it," he cried again. "You read the 'Winning Post' as
if it were the Book of Revelation."

As time passed the gulf that separated me from my husband became still
greater. If I could have entertained him with any kind of gossip we
might have got on better. But I had no conversation that interested him,
and he had little or none that I could pretend to understand. He loved
the town; I loved the country; he loved the night and the blaze of
electric lights; I loved the morning and the sweetness of the sun.

At the bottom of my heart I knew that his mind was common, low and
narrow, and that his tastes were gross and vulgar, but I was determined
to conquer the repulsion I felt for him.

It was impossible. If I could have struck one spark from the flint of
his heart the relations between us might have been different. If his
look could have met my look in a single glance of understanding I coul