As the dull days crept on, so miserably alike one another, Cecil felt it was her duty to be interested in her husband's career. She read the law-reports in the _Times_, the pale shadows of bad puns, whereat there had been laughter, but which could bring no smile to her pensive face. She could not be interested in those dreary lawsuits, those endless disputations about sordid things. So at last she abandoned the effort, and fell back upon her own thoughts, which were sad enough sometimes. As Lord Aspendell's daughter and as Laurence O'Boyneville's wife, Lady Cecil might have had enough of dinner-parties and evening-parties, kettledrums and _déjeûners_; but she had grown weary of all parties long before her marriage, and was glad to escape from the set in which she had lived, and to hide herself in the remote fastnesses of Bloomsbury. "My husband has no time for going out," she said, when her old friends asked her to their houses. "But you can come, Cecil, and Mr. O'Boyneville can look in during the evening." Cecil shook her head. "He is so tired after his day's work that it would be a cruelty to ask him to go out," she said. "And you are going to lead this dull life always, Cecil?" "I don't care for society. I was accustomed to a solitary life with poor papa, and it suits me better than any thing else." But Cecil, looking back upon that old life, remembered with a sigh how dear a companion her father had been. There was nothing in heaven and earth that they had not talked of; no book read by one, and not by the other; no subject so barren that it had not served for pleasant discourse, when the shabby old curtains were drawn, and the lamp lighted in the drawing-room of that dear old tumble-down cottage on the Dyke Road. Cecil did not consider what it was that constituted the grand difference between her father and her husband. She had lived amongst poor people before her marriage, but she had never lived amongst hard-working people. It was very strange to her to have to do with a person who had no leisure for the refinements and amenities of life; who gave short answers, for lack of time to be deliberate and polite; who told her "not to bother," when she asked some womanly question about his health, or his fatigues, in the midst of professional meditations. A woman has acquired sublime patience when she can meekly endure to be bidden not to "bother" her husband, and still love on.