Thus, in eager self-mortification, he humbled himself before Gundred, and believed that she had no suspicion of any defaultings on his side. He felt that he was giving her good measure, pressed down and running over--though only of the second-best. That she guessed it to be the second-best her husband had no notion; so subtle an instinct would always have been beyond the prosaic Gundred whom he had known and married. Now he knew her no longer; life had developed them along different roads. So he continued in the confident hope that he was giving her the perfect satisfaction to which she had the right, while she, for her part, secretly chafed at his obvious efforts, grieved that effort should be necessary, and exerted herself more and more to enter his life again. And as for the future, that might look after itself. Sufficient to the day was the marital duty of it. Marriage, however, is a dead thing by the time it becomes a duty. Kingston had no suspicion of this, but Gundred, suddenly outstripping him in the race of intuitions, understood in her heart of hearts, and felt a mortal chill.
The habits of a lifetime, though, are not easily broken by emotional gales; Gundred, for all her leaping excursions into the regions frequented by Kingston and Isabel, retained her old, well-drilled enthusiasm for domesticity. Hearts might break and sunder, but the trained courage of Gundred saw no reason why soup, for that, should grow tepid, or beds ill-aired. Whatever she might fear or suffer, however much she might strain and agonize for real intimacy with her husband, she could not have excused herself to herself for allowing her attention to wander from his comfort or neglect his health. She pursued the useful tenour of her way with a Spartan cheerfulness that might have been even more splendid than it was had not long habit so engrained in her the zeal of domestic services. She continued overhauling the house, its resources, its supplies, its deficiencies. Lady Adela having handed over to her the reins of government, she assumed them with unfaltering grip. Soon she became the housekeeper’s terror, and put to rout all the slack ease that had prevailed under the ineffectual amiability of her mother-in-law’s rule. While one side of her nature was battering for admittance into Kingston’s life, the other, the older, larger side, was occupied in examining store-cupboards, choosing wall-papers, pulling the house and its appointments into shape once more. Many improvements must be made, lighting remodelled, some of the worst horrors tactfully but decisively obliterated.