Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that
period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives
place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection as
he felt for Alice. "It is just this that holds me," he thought, in his
infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. "If we quarrelled or if there were any
deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should be"--Well,
where would he be? "Probably worse off," he usually added.
Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and,
if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for him--without
telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and
he often wondered how she passed the time when he was not with her.
Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself
with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more
comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself
to start him talking on subjects that interested him.
No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he
found--himself.
One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: "Something
is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.
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