Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/280

WIVES OF THE PRIME MINISTERS his reading or travelling abroad or hunting up bargains in old furniture (of which he was a connoisseur). It was generally considered that it was his wife who kept him up to battle pitch. Yet it is almost a paradox that she could never reconcile herself to the extent to which the political life she did so much to encourage kept him away from her and away from home. She felt this so strongly that in the early days of her long illness there were not wanting people who believed her ill-health to be assumed as a pretext for keeping Sir Henry with her. It would probably be juster to believe that it was the beginnings of ill-health and the consequent sense of dependence which made the commonsense view of the necessities of the situation harder to achieve. Certain it was that she seldom seemed to realise how very severe a tax it might be on a man, who had been hard at work in a contentious atmosphere all day and all the evening, to sit up by a sick-bed or break his sleep to soothe an invalid. Yet by a curious contradiction if there was ever any occasion when Sir Henry was tempted to leave politics altogether, or there was some possibility that he might be defeated by a rival in the contest for leadership, no one was more stubborn than 240