Page:Broken Ties and Other Stories.pdf/186

 moving in a gentle breeze. Her world seemed to her distasteful and mean, like a rotten fruit swept into the dustbin.

From now she regularly visited the theatre every Saturday. The fascination of her first sight of it lost much of its glamour. The painted vulgarity of the actresses and the falseness of their affectation became more and more evident, yet the habit grew upon her. Every time the curtain rose the window of her life’s prison-house seemed to open before her, and the stage, bordered off from the world of reality by its gilded frame and scenic display, by its array of lights and even its flimsiness of conventionalism, appeared to her like a fairyland, where it was not impossible for herself to occupy the throne of the fairy queen.

When for the first time she saw her husband among the audience shouting his drunken admiration for a certain actress, she felt an intense disgust, and prayed in her mind that a day might come when she might have an opportunity to spurn him away with her contempt. But the opportunity seemed remoter every day, for Gopinath was hardly ever to be seen at his home now, being carried away, one knew not where, in the centre of a dust-storm of dissipation.