During the past twenty-fours hours she had pondered deeply over the wisdom to be gained at the hands of polite society. What was the Langrune expedition for her but an experiment, a lesson whereby she might acquire the manners, the temper, the ideas (if such existed) of her husband’s world! The experiment had taught her much. Yet, I think, ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ read and re-read, through tears, had taught her more. She had discovered no transcendental meaning, as a learned Browning Society might have done, in Browning’s words. But she was growing to look at life otherwise than by her own small rushlight of personal experience, to know that it was no new thing for a man’s fancy to die while his wife’s love burned at white heat, to realise that there was a wide world lying outside her own narrow embittered lot--a world to whose beauty and whose teachings the most self-engrossed soul must open itself or perish. Dinah Arbuthnot did not want to perish. She could be content, she thought, although delight was gone out of her days, if use survived; ready to spin the wool and bake the bread; to return to the plain, sweet wholesomeness of workaday existence from which the hapless good fortune of marrying a gentleman had divorced her. To part from Gaston, in short! For an instant she had a physical longing to breathe the air of the Devonshire moorlands. A wild hope crossed her that she might go back to her father’s people, live their village lives, earn her own bread--be Dinah Thurston again. Then her heart smote her with violence. The volume fell to the floor. Could parting from Gaston be a beginning of better things, a turning towards the straight path of duty--that path along which so many a wife has to walk, uncomplaining, through the after years of a marriage to which happiness has not been granted? Her existence at his side was more, now, than a long, slow disappointment. It was a growing anguish, a combat in which ignorant, plain-speaking love on one side had no chance against a succession of sympathetic rivals all uttering perfect little flatteries, all giving perfect little dinners, on the other. And she, Dinah, was not two-and-twenty, and her young heart craved, insistently, for sunshine. And such a slender change, it seemed, in the eternal foreordering of events, a child at her knee, a husband loving the quiet of his own fireside, would have made up the sum of her prosaic ambition!