George Gissing

“ To his sweetheart he had humbled himself; as now, to his wife. The three children grew at his heart-strings. Through the long day of automatic toil he thought constantly of home; yet, in the true sense, home he had none. As soon as he crossed the threshold Mrs. Potter's voice fell upon his ear, and he quailed and shrank into smallness.
"It isn't as though she didn't mean well." Thus to his crony, the fellow-clerk to whom alone he unbosomed himself. "There are men that have beasts of wives, yet live a happier life than I do. She can't cook a meal, but I'd overlook that; she does her best. ”

“ She always seems to expect more; and when she's counted it, why, it's like you'd look at a shoeblack if he tried to cheat you in the change. There's just so much, and only so much, and there'll never be more, and she knows it; and she seems to say, 'Yes, that's the kind of fellow you are—a common stick-in-the-mud clerk. ”

“ She means well. She never spends on herself if she can help it. But what do you s'pose the children think of their father, hearing her talk as she does, and seeing me of no more account in my own house than the door-mat!"
The defect lightly touched upon, his wife's infamous cookery, was more to Potter than to most men of his standing, for he made a hobby of hygiene. ”