Lois Alexander, who had a household to look after, servants to keep in order, children to be attended to, who was subject to the claims of social functions, clubs, friends, and affairs generally, was through everything absorbed in her husband to a degree incredible to anyone but a woman. His attitude toward her had come to occupy the substrata of her thoughts morning, noon, and night. To have him leave with a shade less of affection for her in the morning farewell left her with a sick feeling throughout the day; everything done in those next hours was merely to fill up the time until his return, that she might see then if her exacting soul might be satisfied. Sometimes she reproached him tearfully before he left, and then it was not only with a sick feeling that she spent the day, but with an absolutely intolerant pain, because she must wait until night to set herself right with him again. At those times she could not derive any satisfaction even from her children—her only refuge from weeping herself into a sick-headache was to go to town and shop exhaustingly. One cannot well shed tears in the crowded streets, or before a clerk who is showing one goods over a counter. But when she went shopping too many days in succession the children showed the effects of it in the lawlessness which creeps in in a mother’s absence. She could not understand why the morning reproach and the evening retraction had grown alike unimportant to her husband; after the first surprise and solicitude occasioned by this recurrent state, he had grown to regard it as something to be borne with like any other normal annoyance,—like fog, rain, or mosquitoes,—that measurably lessened the joy of the day, but upon which no action of his had any bearing. A man must have patience with his wife’s complainings, and try always to remember the delicacy of her bodily strength and the many calls upon it, which made little things a grievance to her. He himself never complained; complaint was in itself distasteful to him.