The outlook was depressing. The same fear touched him that must have fallen upon Babel. Here, for life was a companion who on its finer interests would never understand a word he said. He might, perhaps, bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her faith in ignorance as a standard of art. He might in fact taint the sincerity of her admirations. That was all. In art--and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life--they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. The marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share. That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay. Yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself aware. It became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover. They never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow susceptible to the quickened throb of hers. The shy renouncement of her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power, moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before. VIII It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that Caragh's troubles began afresh. He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had. With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they vigorously disbelieved, to his friends. He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'! But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways. And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform. At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness. He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.