After dessert, as
soon as the health of the hostess was drunk, there was a general
stampede to the smoking-room where the political discussions were
continued. The Baroness left her guests and went to the nursery with a
feeling of bitterness in her heart; she realised that her husband had
so far outdistanced her that she could never again hope to come up
with him.
He worked much at home in the evening; frequently he was busy at his
writing-table until the small hours of the morning, but always behind
locked doors. When he noticed afterwards, as he sometimes did, that
his wife went about with red eyes, he felt a pain in his heart; but
they had nothing to say to each other.
Occasionally however, at those times when his work palled, when he
realised that his inner life was growing poorer and poorer, he felt a
void within him, a longing for warmth, for something intimate, something
he had dreamed of long ago, in the early days of his youth. But every
feeling of that sort he suppressed at once as unfaithfulness to his wife,
for he had a very high conception of the duty of a husband.
To bring a little more variety into her daily life, he suggested one
day that she should invite a cousin of whom she had often spoken, but
whom he had never seen, to spend the winter with them in town.
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