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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many
things--including actual assault with the clenched fist--that a wife
will endure; but seldom a wife can bear--as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore--
with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her
weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gayety, her dresses,
her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband
when she knows that she is not what she has been, and--worst of all--
the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of
heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that
he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon,
when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so
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