Dunstone was a strong, quiet kind of man—­a man of conspicuous mediocrity, and rising rapidly, therefore, in his profession.  He was immensely industrious, and a little given to melancholia in private life.  He smoked rather too many cigars, and took his social occasions seriously.  He dressed faultlessly, with a scrupulous elimination of style.  Unlike Mr. Grant Allen’s ideal man, he was not constitutionally a lover; indeed, he seemed not to like the ordinary girl at all—­found her either too clever or too shallow, lacking a something.  I don’t think he knew quite what it was.  Neither do I—­it is a case for extended hand and twiddling fingers.  Moreover, I don’t think the ordinary girl took to Dunstone very much.

He suffered, I fancy, from a kind of mental greyness; he was all subtle tones; the laughter of girls jarred upon him; foolish smartness or amiable foolishness got on his nerves; he detested, with equal sincerity, bright dressing, artistic dabbling, piety, and the glow of health.  And when, as his confidential friend—­confidential, that is, so far as his limits allowed—­I heard that he intended to marry, I was really very much surprised.

I expected something quintessential; I was surprised to find she was a visiting governess.  Harringay, the artist, thought there was nothing in her, but Sackbut, the art critic, was inclined to admire her bones.  For my own part, I took rather a liking to her.  She was small and thin, and, to be frank, I think it was because she hardly got enough to eat—­of the delicate food she needed.  She was shabby, too, dressed in rusty mourning—­she had recently lost her mother.  But she had a sweet, low voice, a shrinking manner, rather a graceful carriage, I thought, and, though she spoke rarely, all she said was sweet and sane.  She struck me as a refined woman in a blatant age.  The general effect of her upon me was favourable; upon Dunstone it was tremendous.  He lost a considerable proportion of his melancholia, and raved at times like a common man.  He called her in particular his “Dear Lady” and his “Sweet Lady,” things that I find eloquent of what he found in her.  What that was I fancy I understand, and yet I cannot say it quite.  One has to resort to the extended arm and fingers vibratile.

Before he married her—­which he did while she was still in half-mourning—­there was anxiety about her health, and I understood she needed air and exercise and strengthening food.  But she recovered rapidly after her marriage, her eyes grew brighter, we saw less of Sackbut’s “delicious skeleton.”  And then, in the strangest way, she began to change.  It is none of my imagining; I have heard the change remarked upon by half a dozen independent observers.  Yet you would think a girl of three-and-twenty (as she certainly was) had attained her development as a woman.  I have heard her compared to a winter bud, cased in its sombre scales, until the sun shone, and the warm, moist winds began to blow.  I noticed first that the delicate outline of her cheek was filling, and then came the time when she reverted to colour in her dress.