For it was a consciousness quickened by jealousy.  Little as Fenwick talked about Madame de Pastourelles, Phoebe understood perfectly that she was a woman of high education and refinement, and that her stored and subtle mind was at once an attraction and a cause of humiliation to John.  And through his rare stories of the Findon household and the Findon dinner-parties, the wife dimly perceived a formidable world, bristling with strange acquirements and accomplishments, in which he, perhaps, was beginning to find a place, thanks to his art; while she, his obscure and ignorant wife, must resign herself to being for ever shut out from it—­to knowing it from his report only.  How could she ever hold her own with such people?  He would talk with them, paint them, dine with them, while she sat at home—­Carrie’s nurse, and the domestic drudge.

And yet she was of that type which represents perhaps the most ambitious element in the lower middle class.  It had been a great matter that she, a small farmer’s daughter, should pass her examinations and rise to be a teacher in Miss Mason’s school.  She had had her triumphs and conceits; had been accustomed to think herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates.  Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John’s eyes, pretentious or absurd.  He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—­women especially—­in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his.  He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him.  And meanwhile she went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning—­for her child and for him.  She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or menage that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or brusquerie.

Meanwhile, if she had been restful, if he could only have forgotten his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been easily master of his discontents.  For he was naturally of a warm, sensuous temper.  Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have held him.

But she was not restful, she was exacting and self-conscious; and, moreover, a certain new growth of Puritanism in her repelled him.  While he had been passing under the transforming influences of an all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to Evangelical religion for consolation.  There was a new minister in a Baptist chapel a mile or two away, of whom she talked, whose services she attended.  The very mention of him presently became a boredom to Fenwick.  The new influence had no effect upon her jealousies