The whole day indeed had worked itself away to cross purpose, and John came home weary with the aching brows that annoyance and worry touch with a peculiar depressing neuralgia.

It need not be described; there are very few who are not familiar with its exhausting, melancholy dejection.
John did his best to meet his wife's more cheerful mood, but the strongest men are often very poor bearers of physical pain.

Jane would have suffered--and did often suffer--the same distress with far less complaint.

Women, too, soon learn to alleviate such a cruel sensation, but John had a strong natural repugnance for drugs and liniments, and it was only when he was weary of Jane's entreaties that he submitted to a merciful medication which ended in a restorative sleep.
This incident did not discourage Jane in her new resolve.

She told herself at once that the first steps on a good or wise road were sure to be both difficult and painful; and in the morning John's cheerful, grateful words and his brave sunny face repaid her fully for the oblivion to which she had consigned her own trials and the subjection she had enforced upon her own personality.
This was the new battle-ground on which she now stood, and at first John hardly comprehended the hard, self-denying conflict she was waging.