That autumn Naomi entered on a time of black depression—an utter gloom and weariness of body and mind. It was no mere dull staggering under blows, merciful in its blindness and lack of acute feeling—it was a clear-eyed misery, in which every object was as distinct as it was dark, like one of those sudden clearings of a stormy landscape, when trees, hedges, meadows, loom under the frowning sky, outstanding and black in detail, more vivid than in sunshine.

She saw now what she was—her husband\'s victim, the tool of his enterprise. He had never really loved her. He had been attracted by her—her beauty, her gentleness, her breeding, had appealed to him. But that was not why he had married her. He had married her for her money, which he was now spending on his farm, and he had married her because he wanted children and she was the most suitable mother he could find. He had never really loved her.

And she had never really loved him. That was another of the things she saw clearly. She had married him because his strength and good looks, his ardent wooing, had turned her head, because she had been weak and he had been masterful. But she had never loved him.

She had been a fool, and now she was paying the price of folly, which is always so much heavier than the price of sin. Here she was at twenty-five, prematurely old, exhausted, sick of life, and utterly alone. There[Pg 104] was no one to turn to in her wretchedness. Her neighbours were incapable of giving her real help or sympathy, Mrs. Backfield invariably took Reuben\'s part and resented the slightest criticism of him, old Gasson was hard and selfish, and not particularly interested in his daughter.

She wished, with all the wormwood that lies in useless regrets, that she had never married. Then, paradoxically, she would not have been so utterly alone. She would have had at least the help of sweet memories undefiled. She could have taken refuge in them from her sorrow, built them perhaps at last into hope. Now she had to thrust them from her, for they were one and all soil............