Page:Des Grieux, The Prelude to Teleny.djvu/105

 smelt of the stable and the sink—with red hands and dirty nails, a freckled face and a fleshy nose, was preferred to her, and though she almost hated her husband now, still she was jealous of him.

As for her child, it had been given out to nurse so she saw but little of it; she felt for it a fitful love, mixed up with gushing tenderness, fretful remorse and shame, she kissed it almost harshly for the sake of the man who had blasted her life, and then thrust it away from her on account of the sin she had committed.

Every day she spent hours at church kneeling before the image of St Sebastian and during the menses her wits almost wildered with devotion.

Life soon became unbearable to her, she got to be more fretful, more peevish, in her morbid sensibility, everything jarred upon her nerves, every smell was loathsome, every noise painful; the craving for perfect rest and forgetfulness grew daily stronger. Soon that attraction which the abyss has for many people existed in her for everything that