About the time when our room opened, Mrs. Cardinal had become almost insupportable to her husband. Poor woman; I always pitied her; she was alone sometimes for a fortnight at a stretch; she read nothing; there was no child to occupy her thoughts; she knew that her husband lived in a world into which she never entered, and she had nothing to do but to brood over imaginary infidelities. She was literally possessed, and who shall be hard upon her? Nobody cared for her; everybody with whom her husband associated disliked her, and she knew perfectly well they never asked her to their houses except for his sake. Cardinal vowed at last he would endure her no longer, and that they must separate. He was induced one Sunday morning, when his resolution was strong within him, and he was just about to give effect to it, to come with us. The quiet seemed to soothe him, and he went home with me afterwards. He was not slow to disclose to me his miserable condition, and his resolve to change it. I do not know now what I said, but it appeared to me that he ought not to change it, and that change would be for him most perilous. I thought that with a little care life might become at least bearable with his wife; that by treating her not so much as if she were criminal, but as if she were diseased, hatred might pass into pity, and pity into merciful tenderness to her, and that they might dwell together upon terms not harder than those upon which many persons who have made mistakes in youth agree to remain with each other; terms which, after much consideration, they adjudge it better to accept than to break loose, and bring upon themselves and those connected with them all that open rupture involves. The difficulty was to get Cardinal to give up his theory of what two abstract human beings should do between whom no love exists. It seemed to him something like atheism to forsake his clearly-discerned, simple rule for a course which was dictated by no easily-grasped higher law, and it was very difficult to persuade him that there is anything of equal authority in a law less rigid in its outline. However, he went home. I called on him some time afterwards, and saw that a peace, or at any rate a truce, was proclaimed, which lasted up to the day of his death. M’Kay and I agreed to make as much of Mrs. Cardinal as we could, and yielding to urgent invitation, she came to the room. This wonderfully helped to heal her. She began to feel that she was not overlooked, put on one side, or despised, and the bonds which bound her constricted lips into bitterness were loosened.
Another friend, and the last whom I shall name, was a young man named Clark. He was lame, and had been so from childhood. His father was a tradesman, working hard from early morning till late at night, and burdened with a number of children. The boy Richard, shut out from the companionship of his fellows, had a great love of books. When he left school his father did not know what to do with him—in fact there was only one occupation open to him, and that was clerical work of one kind or another. At last he got a place in a house in Fleet Street, which did a large business in those days in sending newspapers into the country. His whole occupation all day long was to write addresses, and for this he received twenty-five shillings a week, his hours being from nine o’clock till seven. The office in which he sat was crowded, and in order to squeeze the staff into the smallest space, rent being dear, a gallery had been run round the wall about four feet from the ceiling. This was provided with desks and gas
