What vexed me, though, even more than Norah, was, that when I went to tell my husband, on his return from business that evening, about how the woman had insulted me, he wouldn’t hear a word of it, and said, like a wretch, he was sick and tired of my complaints against the maids, and he never set foot in the house but I had always got some long rigmarole tale about the servant’s bad conduct; adding that it was impossible they should be invariably in the wrong; and he firmly believed it was quite as much, if not more, my fault than theirs. And he even had the impudence to declare, (I thought it best to let him have his own way for once, and go on till he was tired,) that he had quite worry and bother enough of his own at office, and that when he came home, fagged and worn out, to his own fireside, he was determined at least to enjoy peace and quiet at his hearth; and then he asked what on earth I thought he had married me for, (as if I was going to tell him;) when the cruel wretch said--it was only to have a happy home! I told him that it was a nice insult to my own face, indeed, and that he seemed determined to find fault with everything that day, as nothing, however good it was, would please him; whereupon Mr. Sk--n--st--n went on, I’m sure, without knowing what he said, for he declared that I was a millstone round his neck, and the torment of his life; adding, that he begged me once for all to understand, that he would _not_ be pestered every day with my bickerings with the servants; and he had made up his mind that if ever I opened my mouth to him again on the subject, that he would put on his hat that very moment and go and spend his evening at some tavern, where at least he could _enjoy_ himself. Besides, he told me, he could see that Norah was worth her weight in gold to any person who knew how to humour her; for the house had never been so clean ever since we had been married; and the way in which the girl dressed a potato made her so invaluable in his eyes, that he wasn’t going, he could tell me, to have her driven out of the house by me. So that anybody might have seen, like myself, with half an eye, that my gentleman didn’t care so much about “_his own fireside_” after all, and instead of “_his hearth_,” indeed, being uppermost in his mind, that really and truly his stomach was at the bottom of it.