“Ralphie—­” she began, a soft hand on his arm.  He stopped, and she pulled him about so that their faces were close, and he saw her lips curving for a kiss.  Every line of her face sought him, from the sweep of the narrowed eyelids to the dimples that played away from her smile.  His eye received the picture with distinctness; but for the first time it did not pass into his veins.  It was as if he had been struck with a subtle blindness that permitted images to give their colour to the eye but communicated nothing to the brain.

“Good-night,” he said, as he passed on.

When a man felt in that way about a woman he was surely in a position to deal with his case impartially.  This came to Ralph as the joyless solace of the morning.  At last the bandage was off and he could see.  And what did he see?  Only the uselessness of driving his wife to subterfuges that were no longer necessary.  Was Van Degen her lover?  Probably not—­the suspicion died as it rose.  She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted.  She wanted to enjoy herself, and her conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity—­the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security.  Any personal entanglement might mean “bother,” and bother was the thing she most abhorred.  Probably, as the queer formula went, his “honour” was safe:  he could count on the letter of her fidelity.  At moment the conviction meant no more to him than if he had been assured of the honesty of the first strangers he met in the street.  A stranger—­that was what she had always been to him.  So malleable outwardly, she had remained insensible to the touch of the heart.

These thoughts accompanied him on his way to business the next morning.  Then, as the routine took him back, the feeling of strangeness diminished.  There he was again at his daily task—­nothing tangible was altered.  He was there for the same purpose as yesterday:  to make money for his wife and child.  The woman he had turned from on the stairs a few hours earlier was still his wife and the mother of Paul Marvell.  She was an inherent part of his life; the inner disruption had not resulted in any outward upheaval.  And with the sense of inevitableness there came a sudden wave of pity.  Poor Undine!  She was what the gods had made her—­a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure.  He had no desire to “preach down” such heart as she had—­he felt only a stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity that filled his own.  They were fellow-victims in the noyade of marriage, but if they ceased to struggle perhaps the drowning would be easier for both...Meanwhile the first of the month was at hand, with its usual batch of bills; and there was no time to think of any struggle less pressing than that connected with paying them...