Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

If to be happy is to be comfortable Mrs. Mary Fream had nothing to complain of, for Hill House in winter was even more comfortable than Hill House in summer. Yet the winter began with one week of extreme discomfort, an indescribable week when her grandee mounted his horse and made one last charge upon stubborn nature. It proved to be a forlorn hope and a failure, and between them arose a conspiracy of silence, a bargain arranged and sealed without a word being uttered. Tacitly he offered her certain advantages, and she accepted them. It was a silent compact. She was to be the most decorative and live of his possessions, and though they occupied rooms with a door that communicated, who was to know that her grandee was not man enough to command that door.

Self-pity may suggest a more universal pity, and the realization of the human fact that we all of us suffer, and Fream was very kind to his wife, but inarticulately kind. The relationship became rather like that between a self-conscious and awkward father and a spoiled child. After that last and disastrous excursion into romance he seemed to age very rapidly. He tried to redress himself in the habits of the last ten years, and he was at least ten years older. It was a very humiliating experience, and depressing, because he discovered that the destruction of a man's male self-confidence may show its effects elsewhere; in his work. He had gone back to his work as though to hide himself in it, to find a solace and a new self-respect, but his work was not quite the same; nor was he. Undoubtedly he had a flair for figures, and the curiously cold and long-sighted eyes of a money-maker. He had combined a careful shrewdness with intuition. Always, he had taken great care to reconnoitre the field of action; but the final movement had been guided by that intuitive something within himself. He had had audacity.