On the other hand, Dempster's well-satisfied clients.
who were of opinion that the punishment of his wickedness might conveniently be deferred to another world, noticed with some concern that he was drinking more than ever, and that both his temper and his driving were becoming more furious.

Unhappily those additional glasses of brandy, that exasperation of loud-tongued abuse, had other effects than any that entered into the contemplation of anxious clients: they were the little super-added symbols that were perpetually raising the sum of home misery.
Poor Janet! how heavily the months rolled on for her, laden with fresh sorrows as the summer passed into autumn, the autumn into winter, and the winter into spring again.

Every feverish morning, with its blank listlessness and despair, seemed more hateful than the last; every coming night more impossible to brave without arming herself in leaden stupor.
The morning light brought no gladness to her: it seemed only to throw its glare on what had happened in the dim candle-light--on the cruel man seated immovable in drunken obstinacy by the dead fire and dying lights in the dining-room, rating her in harsh tones, reiterating old reproaches--or on a hideous blank of something unremembered, something that must have made that dark bruise on her shoulder, which aches as she dressed herself.
Do you wonder how it was that things had come to this pass--what offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal hatred of this man?
The seeds of things are very small: the hours that lie between sunrise and the gloom of midnight are travelled through by tiniest markings of the clock: and Janet, looking back along the fifteen years of her married life, hardly knew how or where this total misery began; hardly knew when the sweet wedded love and hope that had set for ever had ceased to make a twilight of memory and relenting, before the on-coming of the utter dark.
Old Mrs.Dempster thought she saw the true beginning of it all in Janet's want of housekeeping skill and exactness.

'Janet,' she said to herself, 'was always running about doing things for other people, and neglecting her own house.

That provokes a man: what use is it for a woman to be loving, and making a fuss with her husband, if she doesn't take care and keep his home just as he likes it; if she isn't at hand when he wants anything done; if she doesn't attend to all his wishes, let them be as small as they may?
That was what I did when I was a wife, though I didn't make half so much fuss about loving my husband.