She was his wife too, and he had an idea that of little injuries of that sort there should be no end of bearing on the part of a husband.

Sometimes he would endeavour to explain to her the motives which actuated him; but he had come to fear that they were and must ever be unintelligible to her.

But he credited her with less than her real intelligence.

She did understand the nature of his work and his reasons for doing it; and, after her own fashion, did what she conceived to be her own work in endeavouring to create within his bosom a desire for higher things.
"Surely," she said to herself, "if a man of his rank is to be a minister he should be a great minister;--at any rate as great as his circumstances will make him.

A man never can save his country by degrading himself." In this he would probably have agreed; but his idea of degradation and hers hardly tallied.
When therefore she asked him what they were going to make him, it was as though some sarcastic housekeeper in a great establishment should ask the butler,--some butler too prone to yield in such matters,--whether the master had appointed him lately to the cleaning of shoes or the carrying of coals.