“Remember the man I was before you came to me,” he said reproachfully, yet with a certain pride in recalling the gloom which had been his to discard. Then she said no more,--a trick of hers, which irritated him when he would fain have had her explain and amplify. He liked argument, he liked analysis; and into neither could he draw her. “How unwillingly,” he said, “do you dwell upon personal relationships!” He had lost his gloom and melancholy,--or was it that he had begun to think that hobby ridden to death, sometimes inconvenient to himself and possibly diminishing in impressiveness to other people, and had welcomed his marriage as a plausible reason for abjuring it? His habitual manner he had not altered; he still maintained towards her the same elaborate courtesy and his air of rather patronising protectiveness, as though thanks to the one convention, he revered her, and thanks to the other, condescended. Yet, he had changed; changed from the very day of their marriage. He had paraded her on his arm before their wedding-guests, the smile had wandered perpetually over his lips, he had abandoned his slight stoop, he had straightened himself up into a handsome and possessive bridegroom. She had been too apathetic at heart to be nettled by his so parading her in public: “My wife,” the formula constantly on his lips, had not stirred her resentment; those were the outward shows,--they could not touch her secret being. And, looking at him perhaps nevertheless with a faint surprise, she had ascribed this new manner to his natural triumph at getting her, and had expected a relapse as soon as the novelty should have staled into habit. But there had been no relapse. He had brought her home to Starvecrow, and then she had realised how all the new chintzes, the curtains in the windows, the works of art brought out from the drawers where all these years they had lain concealed, had been but the preparation for this long-schemed change in his mode of thought. They slipped now into their place, they came into their own, small but significant. He had at last now an excuse for shedding with relief the strenuous manner of years. There remained no work for her to do.