It was not by the man’s choice, but the girl’s, that he and Ella found themselves together. At the present time there was only one woman in Lauriston’s world, and in his absorption in his wife the ungrateful fellow was incapable even of feeling his old friendly pleasure in Ella’s society. Her interest in him, on the other hand, as is the way with that splendid institution for the comfort and consolation of man--plain women, had grown tenfold stronger since he had lowered himself to the usual dead level of his foolish sex, by marrying through his eyes. To Ella this downfall was quite tragic; she had thought and hoped so much for him; he had feeling, sense, ambition, was, in fact, not the mere beautifully turned out figure-head of a man who, under various disguises of light or dark complexion, slim or heavy build, was continually saying to her the same commonplaces, betraying to her the same idea-less vacuity, at dinner, ball, and garden-party. Yet here he was, bound for life, and by his own choice, to a beautiful pet animal, with all the fascinating ways of a kitten, who could gambol and scratch, and bask in warmth and shiver in cold, and whom nevertheless he undoubtedly worshipped. Ella, whose mind was of an intellectual cast, and in whom the passions had as yet only developed in an ardent but hazy adoration of dead-and-gone heroes, very naturally underrated the strength of one side of a man’s nature, and was cast down when the creature whose sympathetic comprehension of her highest aspirations had made her raise him to a demi-god proved to be in truth only a very man. She fancied, poor child, that he showed deterioration already; when she reminded him at dinner that she had not yet returned a book of Emerson’s he had lent her, George laughed carelessly, and said he had forgotten all about it. “Don’t you remember you particularly advised me to read the articles on ‘Goethe’ and ‘Napoleon’?” she asked rather acidly. “Oh, yes, they’re very good,” said he, with a man’s irritating frivolity, smiling at his wife, who was shutting one eye and holding her glass of claret up to the light, in imitation of an elderly connoisseur, for the amusement of Dicky. Then, perceiving in a pause that he had offended Ella, he hastened to say penitently: “I haven’t done much reading lately; but you have, I suppose; you are always so good.” “I don’t read because I am _good_, but because I like it,” she answered coldly. And George, reflecting on the oddity of Ella’s trying to improve him as he had tried to improve Nouna, had taken the snub meekly as a bolt of retributive providence. But when she got an opportunity of speech with him alone in the verandah, in a rather melancholy and remorseful frame of mind, she “had her say” after her sex’s fashion.