Its burden weighed her down more and more as the seasons deepened towards winter. This child, so light-heartedly conceived on a day in spring, its presence unnoticeable through the early summer, began to oppress its mother in the saddening autumn, and with winter when the days were dark and short and gloomy, she could no longer forget its existence for a moment. The burden of the child and the burden of the year moved together increasingly towards their culmination. She looked back sadly to the easy days when the child had been light and even her preoccupations had been leavened with hope. Now everything weighed upon her, even the weather which was bleak and dismal: “I declare,” she said fretfully to herself, “I’d be no worse off in the Kennet,” and she skirted the idea, but lacked the desperation to execute it. She was, however, by now quite sufficiently unhappy. She had nearly lost any hope of gaining Lovel, her days were leaden, she lumbered about the house in slovenly clothes, since at the beginning she had used up all her poor finery by wearing her best every day in the hopes of pleasing Lovel’s eye, but now in an access of dejection, she went to the opposite extreme, and took a wilful pleasure in letting him see her at her most sluttish and ungainly. But nothing, she noticed, caused him to alter his manner towards her whether she presented herself in her muslin, or in an old bodice made of some gray tartan-like material, not joining on to her skirt, so that she appeared to be dressed in some thrown-on coverings from off his mother’s bed. But he never varied in his patience and his impersonal kindness; he neither retreated to a greater distance, nor allowed himself to become more approachable. Every evening he returned to his house to rejoin the company of Olver, his mother, and the cumbersome and plangent woman, but by no word did he betray either his nausea or his weariness. “Oh, yes, he’s a good husband,” said Daisy bitterly to young Gorwyn, “he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t hit me, and he gives me all his money. He’s a good husband enough.” Young Gorwyn lounged gracefully round the house-door. “Then you’ve fallen soft,” he observed in his drawling voice, surveying Daisy from head to foot as she stood just within the entrance to the dark passage. “I’ve fallen soft,” she echoed, full of sarcasm.