But if Darwin’s conjugal attachment did not begin with violence and high-wrought passion, it continued and deepened and strengthened with broad sunny richness to the end of his life. And this was just as true, although Mrs. Darwin had no particular affection for his scientific pursuits. I have said elsewhere that she assisted him, and in his work as in everything else she was eager to do her wifely duty and help where she could. But she had no love for the work in itself, and her daughter remarks that though in the beginning she had resolved to enter into her husband’s tastes, she found it impossible. ‘He used to tell how during some lecture at the British Association he said to her, “I am afraid this is very wearisome to you,” to which she quietly answered, “Not more than all the rest,”’[113] And in writing to Lubbock he makes gentle fun of her indifference: ‘Of course you will publish an account of [your discovery]. You will then say whether the insect can fly well through the air. My wife asked, “How did he find that it stayed four hours under water without breathing?” I answered at once: “Mrs. Lubbock sat four hours watching.” I wonder whether I am right.’[114] But Darwin did not demand that the woman he loved should share all his professional ardor. He loved her for other things, which he found in her sufficingly and inexhaustibly, for her patience, her thoughtfulness, her quick and vivacious sympathy and understanding, and the general charm of her character. In a passage of his Autobiography not published till after Mrs. Darwin’s death he said of her: ‘She has been my greatest blessing.... I do not believe she has ever missed an opportunity of doing a kind action to any one near her. I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior in every moral quality, consented to be my wife.’[115] And in the ardor of indiscriminating affection he adds a note of eulogy which could not perhaps be justly written by any one of any one: ‘I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word I would rather have been unsaid.’[116] Darwin’s constant ill-health gave a peculiar quality of intimate dependence to his relation to her whose care did most to make the ill-health tolerable, and Darwin’s son bears emphatic witness to the unfailing devotion, thoughtfulness, and efficacy of that care. ‘For all the latter years of his life she never left him for a night; and her days were so planned that all his resting hours might be shared with her.’[117] Only those who have known the situation can fully appreciate the restraint and constraint involved in such chronic invalidism, not only for the one who bears, but perhaps still more for the one who must watch, and sympathize, and shield, and protect, and as far as possible keep off the pressure and strain of the crowding, noisy, bustling, indifferent world.