I
had faithfully promised to try to love my husband and I prepared to do
so.
Did not love require that a wife should look up to and respect and even
reverence the man she had married? I made up my mind to do that by
shutting my eyes to my husband's obvious faults and seeing only his
better qualities.
What disappointments were in store for me! What crushing and humiliating
disillusionments!
On the night of our arrival in London we put up at a fashionable hotel
in a quiet but well-known part of the West-end, which is inhabited
chiefly by consulting physicians and celebrated surgeons. Here, to my
surprise, we were immediately discovered, and lines of visitors waited
upon my husband the following morning.
I thought they were his friends, and a ridiculous little spurt of pride
came to me from heaven knows where with the idea that my husband must be
a man of some importance in the metropolis.
But I discovered they were his creditors, money-lenders and bookmakers,
to whom he owed debts of "honour" which he had been unable or unwilling
to disclose to my father and his advocate.
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