No More Learning

Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her--
Would to God that she or I had died!
--Confessions.

There was a man called Bronckhorst--a three-cornered, middle-aged man
in the Army--gray as a badger, and, some people said, with a touch of
country-blood in him. That, however, cannot be proved.

Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger
than her husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy
eyelids, over weak eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the
lights fell on it.

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty
public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is.
His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many things--including
actual assault with the clenched fist--that a wife will endure; but
seldom a wife can bear--as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore--with a long course of
brutal, hard chaff, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her
small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make
herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not
what she has been, and--worst of all--the love that she spends on her
children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear
to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning
no harm, in the honeymoon, when folk find their ordinary stock of
endearments run short, and so go to the other extreme to express their
feelings. A similar impulse makes a man say:--"Hutt, you old beast!
"
when a favorite horse nuzzles his coat-front. Unluckily, when the
reaction of marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the
tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say.
But Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her "Teddy," as she called him.

Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps--this is only a theory
to account for his infamous behavior later on--he gave way to the queer
savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty
years' married, when he sees, across the table, the same face of
his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he
continue to sit until day of its death or his own.

Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three breaths
as a rule, must be a "throw-back" to times when men and women were
rather worse than they are now, and is too unpleasant to be discussed.

Dinner at the Bronckhorst's was an infliction few men cared to undergo.
Bronckhorst took a pleasure in saying things that made his wife wince.
When their little boy came in at dessert, Bronckhorst used to give him
half a glass of wine, and naturally enough, the poor little mite got
first riotous, next miserable, and was removed screaming. Bronckhorst
asked if that was the way Teddy usually behaved, and whether Mrs.
Bronckhorst could not spare some of her time to teach the "little beggar
decency. " Mrs. Bronckhorst, who loved the boy more than her own life,
tried not to cry--her spirit seemed to have been broken by her marriage.
Lastly, Bronckhorst used to say:--"There!