After this Cecil tried to make herself happy in her husband's house. She tried to reconcile herself to his long absences, his gloomy preoccupation, his profound slumbers on the mammoth sofa. She tried to be in all things a good and dutiful wife, and to lead her own life peacefully and happily, thanking Providence for having given her so kind a protector, so honest a friend, in the person of the husband who could never be her companion. She arranged her favourite books in a little old-fashioned bookcase in the back drawing-room; she decorated the two gaunt rooms with birds and flowers, and scattered pretty inexpensive nicknacks on the ponderous rosewood tables. Whatever elegance can be imparted to two great dreary apartments, furnished by general order on an upholsterer with all that is most solid in carved rosewood, and all that is most darksome in green damask, Lady Cecil imparted to the Bloomsbury drawing-rooms. But when all was done they were too large for her loneliness, and the days and nights seemed very long in them. She had piles of new books from a mighty emporium in the neighbourhood, and she read herself almost blind sometimes before the day was done. She had a neat little brougham in which to pay visits or drive in the park, but she did not care to retain fashionable acquaintances whose ways were no longer her ways. The delights for which she pined were not the frivolous joys of Belgravian drawing-rooms, nor the glare and glitter of Tyburnian festivals. When her fancies wandered away from the Bloomsbury realities into the world of visions, they carried her to fair cities in distant lands, to sombre German forests and snow-clad Swiss mountains, towering upward in an atmosphere whose breath is like the breath of a new life revivifying a worn-out body. She thought how peaceful, how very nearly happy, the quiet autumn days spent in Devonshire with her husband had seemed to her. Mr. O'Boyneville was not a man to do things by halves, and when he divorced himself from business the separation was always a complete one. During the brief honeymoon he had been the most devoted and submissive of husbands, the tenderest of friends, the most sympathetic of companions; but once within a shilling cab-fare of the law-courts, the husband and the lover froze into the man of business, and Giddles _v._ Clithery, or Jones _v._ Robinson, or Smith against Brown and others, reigned paramount.