This connection still further enlarged their world.  Men who wrote or drew prettily for the public came at times to their house, and his editor came very often.  He thought him rather an ass because he had such big front teeth (the proper thing is to have small, even teeth) and wore his hair a trifle longer than most men do.  However, some dukes wear their hair long, and the fellow indubitably knew his business.  The worst was that his gravity, though perfectly portentous, could not be trusted.  He sat, elegant and bulky, in the drawing-room, the head of his stick hovering in front of his big teeth, and talked for hours with a thick-lipped smile (he said nothing that could be considered objectionable and not quite the thing) talked in an unusual manner—­not obviously irritatingly.  His forehead was too lofty—­unusually so—­and under it there was a straight nose, lost between the hairless cheeks, that in a smooth curve ran into a chin shaped like the end of a snow-shoe.  And in this face that resembled the face of a fat and fiendishly knowing baby there glittered a pair of clever, peering, unbelieving black eyes.  He wrote verses too.  Rather an ass.  But the band of men who trailed at the skirts of his monumental frock-coat seemed to perceive wonderful things in what he said.  Alvan Hervey put it down to affectation.  Those artist chaps, upon the whole, were so affected.  Still, all this was highly proper—­very useful to him—­and his wife seemed to like it—­as if she also had derived some distinct and secret advantage from this intellectual connection.  She received her mixed and decorous guests with a kind of tall, ponderous grace, peculiarly her own and which awakened in the mind of intimidated strangers incongruous and improper reminiscences of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle; of a gothic tower—­of an overgrown angel.  Her Thursdays were becoming famous in their world; and their world grew steadily, annexing street after street.  It included also Somebody’s Gardens, a Crescent—­a couple of Squares.

Thus Alvan Hervey and his wife for five prosperous years lived by the side of one another.  In time they came to know each other sufficiently well for all the practical purposes of such an existence, but they were no more capable of real intimacy than two animals feeding at the same manger, under the same roof, in a luxurious stable.  His longing was appeased and became a habit; and she had her desire—­the desire to get away from under the paternal roof, to assert her individuality, to move in her own set (so much smarter than the parental one); to have a home of her own, and her own share of the world’s respect, envy, and applause.  They understood each other warily, tacitly, like a pair of cautious conspirators in a profitable plot; because they were both unable to look at a fact, a sentiment, a principle, or a belief otherwise than in the light of their own dignity, of their own glorification, of their own advantage.  They skimmed over the surface of life hand in hand, in a pure and frosty atmosphere—­like two skilful skaters cutting figures on thick ice for the admiration of the beholders, and disdainfully ignoring the hidden stream, the stream restless and dark; the stream of life, profound and unfrozen.