He was intolerable now except under the
influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her
eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out
all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but
even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant,
and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was
drinking a little too much.
For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in
his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor--even his interest in reading
his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant
bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which
they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What
Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that
great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was
being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a
housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee,
prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the
afternoons, and in the evenings she read--books, magazines, anything she
found at hand.
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