attitudes of Anne.  In his imagination they reduced themselves to one, the attitude of inscrutable physical repugnance.  He had accepted (as he had told himself so often) the situation she had created.  It appeared to him, of all situations, the crudest and most simple.  It had its merciful limits.  The discomfort of it, once vague, had grown, to his thwarted senses, almost brutally defined.  He could at least say, “It was here the trouble began, and here, therefore, it shall end.”

He thought he had sounded the depths of her repugnance, and could measure by it his own misery.  He said, “At any rate I know where I am”; and he believed that if he stayed where he was, if he respected his wife’s prejudices, her prejudices would be bound to respect him.  He could not make her love him, but at least he considered that he had justified his claim to her respect.

And now she had opened his eyes, and he had looked at her, and seen things that had not (till that moment) come into his vision of their separation.  He saw subtler hostilities, incurable, indestructible repugnances, attitudes at which his charity stood aghast.  The situation (so far from being crude and simple) involved endless refinements and complexities of torture.  He despaired now of ever reaching her.

Majendie had caught his first clear sight of the spiritual ramparts.

“I’m not good enough for her,” he said.  She had kept him with her that evening, not because she wanted him to stay, but because she wanted him to understand.

He had shown her that he understood by going to the friends for whom he was good enough, who were good enough for him.

He went more than ever now, sometimes to the Ransomes, oftener to Gorst, oftenest of all to Lawson Hannay.  He liked more than ever to sit with Mrs. Hannay; to lean up against the everlasting soft cushion she presented to his soreness.  More than ever he liked to talk to her of simple things; of their acquaintance; of Edith, who had been a little better, certainly no worse, this summer; of Peggy, of Peggy’s future and her education.  He would sit for hours on Mrs. Hannay’s sofa, his body leaning back, his head bowed forward, his chin sunk on his breast, listening attentively, yet with a dazed and rather stupid expression, to Mrs. Hannay’s conversation.  His own was sometimes monotonous and a little dull.  He was growing even physically heavy.  But Mrs. Hannay did not seem to mind.

There was a certain justice in Anne’s justification.  He didn’t consciously prefer the Hannays’ society to hers; but he actually found it more agreeable, and for the reasons she suspected.  They did worship him; and their worship did make him feel superior, perhaps when he was least so.  They did flatter him; for, as Mrs. Hannay said, “He needed a little patting on the back, now and then, poor fellow.”  And perhaps he was really sinking a little to her level; he had so lost his sense of her vulgarity.