It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his mutations, the grieved conviction of instability. He, least of all men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy. Of what impression, he asked himself mournfully, had he ever kept the print. It was odious, contemptible. He was sick of his inconstancy; it took the exalting seriousness from life. But though for his fickleness he blamed no one but himself, he realized that it had been aided by his somewhat unfortunate predilections. None of the women whose fascination he had acknowledged could be considered an inspiration to stability. The very colour of their charm had a chameleon quality and his appreciation was, too often, for its susceptive changes. Yet, had he met, so at least he told himself, some sober-sweet demand upon his constancy, he believed that, in conduct at any rate, he could have sustained it. Well, the demand had now been made, and if he had not faced it with any furious gratitude, here was in him a humble determination to realize for one woman at least her conception of a man. That resolve had stiffened him into something approaching a romantic attitude on that fairy beach in the first shock of his unlooked-for conquest, and it sustained him now, more or less, while during the slow dull journey he reflected soberly as a conqueror on the administration of his new possession. There was a good deal to be thought of; a good deal about him that would have to go. Economies to be effected, not in expenditure only--that was a small matter--but in life. And in life it had pleased him hitherto to be just a little extravagant. He had wasted it generously, for others as heedlessly as for himself. He had done nothing, as he was so often, so importantly reminded; but then, in a happier sense, he had done everything. Done it with a simplicity, a gaiety, a frugality even; since, after all, it was the evanescent, the immaterial things he cared for; the goods that are never marked in plain figures and only paid for in life. Well, there would be an end to that sort of payment, save such as went into his wife's pocket. She seemed, poor pretty thing, to swell and spread, ogreishly, between him and--if he must confess it--his most alluring interests. Her warding arms shut out the enchantment of all the charming women in the world. Truly, he reflected, in the matter of a woman's value, the man who, with an income just sufficient for himself, sought her hand in marriage, must seem the most determined optimist under the sun. Yet he felt anything but an optimist when the darkness of the night gave place to white clouds of steam above the rocking oily blackness of harbour water, and he dragged himself stiff and tired from his ill-lit carriage into the blanching glare of Kingston jetty. IV Caragh found at his rooms, when he arrived in London, in the forefront of his correspondence, a letter and a telegram.