Yet for week after week he lingered away from Greenfield; even months
rolled by, and, except for rare and brief visits home, Hitty saw no more
of her husband than if he were not hers. She lapsed into her old
solitude, varied only by the mutterings and grumblings of old Keery, who
had lifted up her voice against Hitty's marriage with more noise and
less effect than Mrs. Perkins, and, though she still staid by her old
home and haunts, revenged herself on fate in general and her mistress in
particular by a continual course of sulking, all the time hiding under
this general quarrel with life a heart that ached with the purest
tenderness and pity. So some people are made, like chestnuts; one gets
so scratched and wounded in the mere attempt to get at the kernel
within, that it becomes matter of question whether one does not suffer
less from wanting their affection than from trying to obtain it. Yet
Hitty Dimock had too little love given her to throw away even Keery's
habit of kindness to her, and bore with her snaps and snarls as meekly
as a saint,--sustained, it is true, by a hope that now began to solace
and to occupy her, and to raise in her oppressed soul some glimmer of a
bright possibility, a faint expectation that she might yet regain her
husband's love, a passion which she began in her secret heart to fear
had found its limit and died out. Still, Hitty, out of her meek,
self-distrusting spirit, never blamed Abner Dimock for his absence or
his coldness; rather, with the divine unselfishness that such women
manifest, did she blame herself for having linked his handsome and
athletic prime with her faded age, and struggle daily with the morbid
conscience that accused her of having forgotten his best good in the
indulgence of her own selfish ends of happiness. She still thought, "He
is so good to me!" still idealized the villain to a hero, and, like her
kind, predestined to be the prey and the accusing angel of such men,
prayed for and adored her husband as if he had been the best and