There was no hope for her inside the house. Her entire life was in the house. She only left it to do her shopping or to go to Mass. She went to the early Mass on Sundays (she and John had always gone together), and Hubert went to the late Mass by himself. It had been many years before John left since the three of them had gone for a walk together, and she and Hubert never went anywhere or visited anyone. He never brought anybody from the shop to his house, to spend an evening or to see the garden in the summertime or anything like that. From the time they were married, Hubert had shown that he distrusted her with money — he said she had no head for money — and as the years went by he had come to distrust her presence everywhere except in the house. In moments of nervousness — with the priests at John’s school or at occasional gatherings they had attended in the early days of their marriage — Hubert had noticed that his wife turned into a different person. In the presence of strangers, she sometimes took to smiling. One minute she would produce a smile of trembling timidity, as though she had been told she would be beaten unless she looked pleasant, and then again, a minute later, there would be a grimace of absurd condescension on her face. And before anyone knew it, she would be standing or sitting in stony silence, without a word to say, causing everybody to look at her and wonder about her. And if she did speak, she would try to cover her country accent with a genteel enunciation, very precise and thin, that Hubert, from his observation of the world, knew to be vulgar. He felt it was better to leave her where she felt at ease, at home. Somehow she wasn’t up to the mark. She wasn’t able to learn how things were done or what to say. She had no self-confidence, and then, too, her feelings were very easily hurt. If you tried to tell her anything she took it as an insult. Hubert thought it was very hard for a man in his position to have to be ashamed of his wife, but there it was, he was ashamed of her. And he was sorry for her, because her failure was not her fault. She had been born the way she was. There was nothing to be done about it.