Burton, at any rate, spent a
miserable two hours. He hated the stiff, brand-new public garden in
which they walked, with its stunted trees, its burnt grass, its
artificial and weary flower-beds. He hated the people who stood about
as they did, listening to the band,--the giggling girls, the callow,
cigarette-smoking youths, the dressed up, unnatural replicas of his own
wife and himself, with whom he was occasionally forced to hold futile
conversation. He hated the sly punch in the ribs from one of his
quondam companions, the artful murmur about getting the missis to look
another way and the hurried visit to a neighboring public-house, the
affected anger and consequent jokes which followed upon their return.
As they walked homeward, the cold ugliness of it all seemed almost to
paralyze his newly awakened senses. It was their social evening of the
week, looked forward to always by his wife, spoken of cheerfully by him
even last night, an evening when he might have had to bring home friends
to supper, to share a tin of sardines, a fragment of mutton, Dutch
cheese, and beer which he himself would have had to fetch from the
nearest public-house. He wiped his forehead and found that it was wet.
Then Ellen broke the silence.
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