I sometimes felt, as we took our long walks through the monotonous country,
across the oak-dotted grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green,
serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops,
the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and
the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down
every tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intense
and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I
seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply
such a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just he
should be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out his
soul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would it
ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained
representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to
understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic
vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the name
of Alice Oke?
So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was condemned
also to suffer from his inability to do so.
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