midnight
Every feverish morning , with its blank listlessness and despair , seemed more hateful than the last ; every coming night more impossible to brave without arming herself in leaden stupor . The morning light brought no gladness to her : it seemed only to throw its glare on what had happened in the dim candle-light -- on the cruel man seated immovable in drunken obstinacy by the dead fire and dying lights in the dining-room , rating her in harsh tones , reiterating old reproaches -- or on a hideous blank of something unremembered , something that must have made that dark bruise on her shoulder , which aches as she dressed herself . Do you wonder how it was that things had come to this pass -- what offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal hatred of this man ? The seeds of things are very small : the hours that lie between sunrise and the gloom of midnight are travelled through by tiniest markings of the clock : and Janet , looking back along the fifteen years of her married life , hardly knew how or where this total misery began ; hardly knew when the sweet wedded love and hope that had set for ever had ceased to make a twilight of memory and relenting , before the on-coming of the utter dark . Old Mrs. Dempster thought she saw the true beginning of it all in Janet 's want of housekeeping skill and exactness . ` Janet , ' she said to herself , ` was always running about doing things for other people , and neglecting her own house . That provokes a man : what use is it for a woman to be loving , and making a fuss with her husband , if she does n't take care and keep his home just as he likes it ; if she is n't at hand when he wants anything done ; if she does n't attend to all his wishes , let them be as small as they may ?