I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to have
really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a something
as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and
perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Oke
as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. I
neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I
had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her on
the brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological
explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented my
ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were
but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a
guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a
sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our
walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly
dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his
wife thought the neighbours a bore.
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