The wife of a man like
that's no better than a slave. She began to show the strain of it at
last; though she's the sort who goes on till she snaps. It took him four
years to realize. Then, the question was, what were they to do? He's a
very High Churchman, with all their feeling about marriage; but luckily
his pride was wounded. Anyway, they separated two years ago; and there
she is, left high and dry. People say it was her fault. She ought to
have known her own mind--at twenty! She ought to have held on and hidden
it up somehow. Confound their thick-skinned charitable souls, what do
they know of how a sensitive woman suffers? Forgive me, Lady Barbara--I
get hot over this." He was silent; then seeing her eyes fixed on him,
went on: "Her mother died when she was born, her father soon after her
marriage. She's enough money of her own, luckily, to live on quietly. As
for him, he changed his parish and runs one somewhere in the Midlands.
One's sorry for the poor devil, too, of course! They never see each
other; and, so far as I know, they don't correspond. That, Lady Barbara,
is the simple history."
Barbara, said, "Thank you," and turned away; and he heard her mutter:
"What a shame!"
But he could not tell whether it was Mrs. Noel's fate, or the husband's
fate, or the thought of Miltoun that had moved her to those words.
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