“Waring was lost in some new speculation, his wife was lost in a bad dream. I suppose this late awakening of her nature is good for her, but it seems cruel. It hurts one to see her suffer in that still, patient way of hers, and it will play the deuce with Waring’s way of life if it goes on. It wasn’t nature, of course, but that absolute oneness of their life was a beautiful thing to watch, and quite unique. I suppose I ought to be glad that it has received this check, but I’m not.” “Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself for wanting to perpetuate such a life—have you forgotten Gwen’s face?” “Shall I ever forget it, Ruth? But anything absolutely unusual in a sober married couple, and in a Midland parish on a clay soil, the carnal mind will cling to like any burr. Let us put the moralities aside for a moment and consider the subject with the pagan mind. What would outside life be to you or to me in these smug levels, except for that delicious pair of maniacs? We both know how stodgy undiluted duty grows, how one’s feet stick and stumble in it, faithfully as one tries to keep one’s eyes on the ‘everlasting hills’; how dreary and hopeless work often seems in scattered districts, with neither abject poverty nor active crime to fight against, to raise and keep alive in one the inspiring battle greed. But to be obliged to face a level life daily; to spend one’s soul in trying to raise sodden dough; to galvanize half-dead things, heavy, dull, sullen hearts, neither hot nor cold, desiring neither good nor evil, knowing neither tears nor laughter, but slogging on to the grave in dreadful patience! And, in spite of exceptions, this is the life of dozens of country parsons, only we hold our tongues about it, or else we hunt and fatten ourselves, or we have big families to blunt our feelings.” “John, what’s wrong?” she said. He stroked her hair softly. “Nothing except myself, I suppose. You know I was at the Low Church Meeting yesterday, and the fellows tried me, some of them are so intense as regards food—that isn’t so indecent as haste, however. In the hurry to gobble his brown soup that he might have a go at the white, Lang nearly choked himself. Then it went against one to see how they swallowed syrupy port, one could feel the saccharine sediment on one’s tongue, it showed somehow a defective development. Then when gossip, chiefly concerning the gone-astray young women of the neighbourhood set in, they grew so keen on their subject, that three of them fairly spluttered. When this course was removed and religion brought on, one seemed to get a blow at every turn, the meat and the drink had got into our souls and it came out in our speech.