At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play. It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it. At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried: "You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations." "Ah!" She too was angry now. "What else is it?" "By God!" he said. "I thought it led to love." And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father's cynicism. For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext--wished to have some of the rooms papered--and went to stay with her mother. XII ESCAPE _Ant._ Come, I'll be out of the ague, For to live thus is not indeed to live, It is a mockery and abuse of life. I will not henceforth serve myself by halves! Love all or nothing. _Delio._ Your own virtue save you! HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at this: "They won't come out to meet me, and when I go out to meet them, they run away. I cannot enjoy their pleasures, and they seem to want nothing else. It gets worse and worse. I couldn't even talk to Elsie now. Almost anyone can make me seem ridiculous." Linda wrote to him: