“It’s hard to believe it,” he answered a little stiffly, in his dry and gentle voice, which held a curious note of finality, of failure.  For the first time, while he spoke, she let her eyes rest frankly upon him, and there came to her, as she did so, a vivid realization of the emptiness and aimlessness of his life.  He looked handsomer than ever; he looked stately and formal and impressive; but he looked old—­though he was only forty-five—­he looked old and ineffectual and acquiescent.  The fighting strength, such as it was, had gone out of him, and the stamp of failure was on him, from his high, pale, intellectual forehead, where the fine brown hair had retreated to the crown of his head, to his narrow features, and his relaxed slender limbs, with their slow and indolent movements.  He was one of those, she felt intuitively, who had stood aloof from the rewards as well as from the strains of the struggle, who had withered to the core, not from age, but from an inherent distrust of all effort, of all endeavour.  For his immobility went deeper than any physical habit:  it attacked, like an incurable malady, the very fibre and substance of his nature.  With his intellect, his training, his traditions, she discerned, with a flash of insight, that he had failed because he lacked the essential faith in the future.  He had lost, not because he had risked, but because he had hesitated, not because he had loved ease, but because he had feared effort.  For fear of a misstep, he had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the opportunity of happiness.  She knew now why he had never come to her, why he had let her slip from his grasp.  All that was a part of his failure, of his distrust of life, of his profound negation of spirit.

“Yes, it is hard,” she assented; and there came over her like a sudden sense of discomfort, of physical hardship, the knowledge that, in the very beginning, she was trying to make conversation.  Meeting his sympathetic smile—­the smile that still delighted the impressionable hearts of old ladies—­she told herself obstinately, with desperate determination, that she was not disappointed, that he was just as she had remembered him, dear and lovable and kind and conventional.  When she recalled what he had been at twenty-seven, it appeared inevitable to her that at forty-five he should have settled a little more firmly into the mould of the past, that his opinions should have crystallized and imprisoned his mind immovably in the centre of them.

She told him what she could about Archibald and Fanny—­about her choice of schools, her maternal pride in Archibald’s intellect and Fanny’s appearance, her hopeful plans for the future—­and he listened attentively, with his manner of slightly pompous consideration, while he passed one of his long narrow hands over his forehead.  When she had finished her vivacious recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely about himself, with the tolerant and impersonal detachment