Mary-Louisa was a wedded wife, now. But she was more lonely than she
had been before. Embittered by her disappointment, sure of her husband
who was now legally tied to her, she began to take all those liberties
which married people look upon as their right. What she had once
regarded in the light of a voluntary gift, she now considered a
tribute due to her. She entrenched herself behind the honourable title
of "the mother of his children," and from there she made her sallies.
Simple-minded, as all duped husbands are, he could never grasp what
constituted the sacredness in the fact that she was the mother of
_his_ children. Why his children should be different from other
children, and from himself, was a riddle to him.
But, with an easy conscience, because his children had a legal mother
now, he commenced to take again an interest in the world which he had
to a certain extent forgotten in the first ecstasy of his love-dream,
and which later on he had neglected because he hated to leave his wife
and children alone.
These liberties displeased his wife, and since there was no necessity
for her to mince matters now, and she was of an outspoken disposition,
she made no secrets of her thoughts.
But he had all the lawyer's tricks at his fingers' ends, and was never
at a loss for a reply.
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