Explore "The Valley of the Shadow" by H.C. McNeile on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For the twentieth time Hilda Garling asked herself the same question-Why had her husband asked Jack Denver to stay? Mechanically she helped herself to some dish which the footman was handing to her, hardly knowing what it was she took. Why had he asked Jack to stay?
Such a thing was so completely foreign to her husband's habits of late. For the last year or so he had grown more and more of a recluse, shutting himself away for hours and even days at a time, and having his meals served in his own room, until the big house standing back from the Portsmouth road had seemed a veritable prison to his wife. Not that it was much better when her husband did come out of his seclusion, but at any rate he was a human being of her own class.