If he had been told that he neglected his wife he would have been justly indignant.

Also, it never occurred to him that a woman did not always want to talk philosophy or discuss the price of wheat or the cost of flour-barrels; and that for a man to be stupidly and foolishly fond was dearer to a woman than anything else.

How should he know--yet he ought to have done so, if he really was a philosopher--that a woman would want the cleverest man in the world to be a boy and play the fool sometimes; that she would rather, if she was a healthy woman, go to a circus than to a revelation of the mysteries of the mind from an altar of culture, if her own beloved man was with her.
Carmen had been left too much alone, as M.Fille had said to Judge Carcasson.

Her spirits had moments of great dullness, when she was ready to fling herself into the river--or the arms of the schoolmaster or the farrier.

When she first came to St.Saviour's, the necessity of adapting herself to the new conditions, of keeping faith with herself, which she had planned on the Antoine, and making a good wife to the man who was to solve all her problems for her, prevailed.