They were to leave in a month. It seemed to him to be his duty to
leave that place and to go away, to support Leonora. He did his
duty.
It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that whatever she
did caused him to hate her. He hated her when he found that she
proposed to set him up as the Lord of Branshaw again--as a sort of
dummy lord, in swaddling clothes. He imagined that she had done
this in order to separate him from Maisie Maidan. Hatred hung in
all the heavy nights and filled the shadowy corners of the room.
So when he heard that she had offered to the Maidan boy to take
his wife to Europe with him, automatically he hated her since he
hated all that she did. It seemed to him, at that time, that she could
never be other than cruel even if, by accident, an act of hers were
kind. . . . Yes, it was a horrible situation.
But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to clear up that hatred as
if it had been a curtain. They seemed to give him back admiration
for her, and respect. The agreeableness of having money lavishly
at command, the fact that it had bought for him the
companionship of Maisie Maidan--these things began to make
him see that his wife might have been right in the starving and
scraping upon which she had insisted.
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