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II
Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity.
The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully
disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food
had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the
quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather
than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under
duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt
to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her
husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle
the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental
states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed
an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was
lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an
indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to
attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some
frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards,
which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the
perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of
two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and
excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was
at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued.
187
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