and as such it was bound to be hard on somebody.  He admitted that it was particularly hard on Flossie.  It would have been harder still if Flossie had been out of work; but Flossie, with characteristic prudence, had held on to her post till the very eve of her wedding-day, and had contrived to return to it when she foresaw the necessity for delay.  Otherwise he would have had to insist on providing for her until she was independent again; which would have complicated matters really most horribly.  It was quite horrible enough to have to explain all this to Flossie.  The last time he had explained things (for he had explained them) to Flossie the result had not been exactly happy.  But then the things themselves had been very different, and he had had to admit with the utmost contrition that a woman could hardly have had more reasonable grounds for resentment.  That was all over and done with now.  In that explanation they had explained everything away.  They had left no single thread of illusion hanging round the life they were to live together.  They accepted themselves and each other as they were.  And in the absence of any brighter prospect for either of them there was high wisdom in that acceptance.

If then there was a lack of rapture in his relations with Flossie, there would henceforth at any rate be calm.  Her temperament was, he judged, essentially placid, not to say apathetic.  There was a soft smoothness about the plump little lady that would be a security against friction.  She was not great at understanding; but, taking it all together, she was now in an infinitely better position for understanding him than she had been two weeks ago.  Besides, it was after all a simple question of figures; and Flossie’s attitude to figures was, unlike his own, singularly uninfluenced by passion.  She would take the sensible, practical view.

The sensible practical view was precisely what Flossie did take.  But her capabilities of passion he had again misjudged.

He chose his moment with discretion, when time and place and Flossie’s mood were most propitious.  The time was Sunday evening, the place was the Regent’s Park, Flossie’s mood was gentle and demure.  She had been very nice to him since his father’s death, and had shown him many careful small attentions which, with his abiding sense of his own shortcomings towards her, he had found extremely touching.  She seemed to him somehow a different woman, not perhaps so pretty as she had been, but nicer.  He may have been the dupe of an illusory effect of toilette, for Flossie was in black.  She had discussed the propriety of mourning with Miss Bishop, and wore it to-day for the first time with a pretty air of solemnity mingled with satisfaction in her own delicate intimation that she was one with her lover in his grief.  She had not yet discovered that black was unbecoming to her, which would have been fatal to the mood.