So they waited a week, three weeks in fact.  The delay gave Tyson time to study the New Life in all its bearings.  At first it seemed to him that he too had attained.  He was ready to fall in with all his wife’s innocent schemes.  For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with excitement that was pleasure in itself.  He was perfectly prepared for an open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course of action, the more violent the better.  He dreamed of cataclysms and upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express trains from London, the place of all disaster.  His soul would have been appeased by a telegram.

Instead of telegrams he received doctors’ bulletins, contradictory, ambiguous, elusive.  They began to get on his nerves.

Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained.  At any rate he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace.  It looked like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which seemed to be a feature of the New Life.

The New Life was not exhausting.  He had an idea that he could keep it up indefinitely.  But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming, stagnant calm.  Before long he would be given over to dullness and immitigable ennui.

A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly.  He would have pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got something to do.  And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson would have done.  Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions.  Ah, those emotions!  If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious there might have been some chance for him.  But sentimentalism, subtlest source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an extravagant hope.  The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful activity by the shock of his wife’s illness.  He stayed indoors, lounging in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife’s bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by her side.  In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness’ sake, and get some fresh air.  Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he left before the end of the first act.  Hereditary conscience rose up and thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar and dragged him home.  Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that would “suit my wife.”  Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally extravagant tastes.  The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful eyes.