For during the last fortnight, as it seemed to Ashe, all the winds of
tempest had been blowing through his house. Himself, the servants, even
Margaret, even the child, had all suffered. He also had lost his temper
several times--such a thing had scarcely happened to him since his
childhood. He thought of it as of a kind of physical stain or weakness.
To keep an even and stoical mind, to laugh where one could not
conquer--this had always seemed to him the first condition of decent
existence. And now to be wrangling over an expenditure, an engagement, a
letter, the merest nothing--whether it was a fine day or it
wasn't--could anything be more petty, degrading, intolerable?
He vowed that this should stop. Whatever happened, he and Kitty should
not degenerate into a pair of scolds--besmirch their life with quarrels
as ugly as they were silly. He would wrestle with her, his beloved,
unreasonable, foolish Kitty; he ought, of course, to have done so
before. But it was only within the last week or so that the horizon had
suddenly darkened--the thing grown serious. And now this beastly
paragraph! But, after all, what did such garbage matter? It would of
course be a comfort to thrash the editor.
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