For, now that they were over, yet still fresh in her mind, the trials she had suffered during those few months of married life seemed, in these first days of relief from them, even greater than they had really been. Harry seemed more brutal, more ignorant, more dissipated, Lady Braithwaite and Lilian more coldly insolent, George more selfish, Wilfred more drunken, Stephen more unkind; so that the stage held out attractions for her in the social oblivion it involved which it would have been far from having in her eyes in other circumstances. Not once did the thought occur to Annie that she was doing wrong in thus leaving her husband without consulting him. From the first she had been too obviously his superior in judgment to set any value on his opinion, and now she only thought she was ridding him as well as herself of an intolerable burden in the simplest manner. She had tried hard to do her duty as a wife, and had succeeded only in exasperating him against her and in unwittingly irritating him to more than his customary excesses. In leaving him free she thought she was rendering him the highest service in her power; and in freeing herself she felt, with a throb of joy, that she was once more able to indulge in her old dreams of ambition and success. But in this argument with herself she forgot one thing--namely, that she had not left Harry free. This forgetfulness was the natural result of the effacement she had suffered at Garstone Grange which had caused her to depreciate her duties as they had depreciated her rights. It did not occur to her to think that she, morally the stronger of the two, was abandoning her husband, in all the first heat of a singularly wild and passionate nature, to a life in which the innocent indulgence of the affections was no longer possible; for she looked upon him as a brute incapable of any but the lowest forms of love. As for herself, she did not think herself in danger--she was of cooler temperament and higher intellect; her imagination took fire much more readily than her heart; she had thrown herself into the prospect of a brilliant career, and the idea of leading a loveless life had few terrors for her at first, except in rare moments of depression.