She endeavoured to learn of him, but her dulness and his impatience made this attempt a failure; her human qualities had to suffice.

And they did, until Yule began to lift his head above the literary mob.

Previously, he often lost his temper with her, but never expressed or felt repentance of his marriage; now he began to see only the disadvantages of his position, and, forgetting the facts of the case, to imagine that he might well have waited for a wife who could share his intellectual existence.

Mrs Yule had to pass through a few years of much bitterness.

Already a martyr to dyspepsia, and often suffering from bilious headaches of extreme violence, her husband now and then lost all control of his temper, all sense of kind feeling, even of decency, and reproached the poor woman with her ignorance, her stupidity, her low origin.