“I see the fountains, and the gardens where
You sang the fury from the Satrap’s brow;
I feel the quiver of the raptured air
I heard you in the Athenian grove—­I hear you now.”

As the words flashed into her mind now she looked at her husband steadfastly.  Were there, then, some unexplored regions in his nature, where things dwelt, of which she had no glimmering of knowledge?  Did he understand more of women than she thought?  Could she then really talk to him of a thousand things of the mind which she had ever ruled out of any commerce between them, one half of her being never opened up to his sight?  Not that he was deficient in intellect, but, to her thought, his was a purely objective mind; or was it objective because it had not been trained or developed subjectively?  Had she ever really tried to find a region in his big nature where the fine allusiveness and subjectivity of the human mind could have free life and untrammelled exercise, could gambol in green fields of imagination and adventure upon strange seas of discovery?  A shiver of pain, of remorse, went through her frame now, as he held her at arm’s length and looked at her....  Had she started right?  Had she ever given their natures a chance to discover each other?  Warmth and passion and youth and excitement and variety—­oh, infinite variety there had been!—­but had the start been a fair one, had she, with a whole mind and a full soul of desire, gone to him first and last?  What had been the governing influence in their marriage where she was concerned?

Three years of constant motion, and never an hour’s peace; three years of agitated waters, and never in all that time three days alone together.  What was there to show for the three years?  That for which he had longed with a great longing had been denied him; for he had come of a large family, and had the simple primitive mind and heart.  Even in his faults he had ever been primitively simple and obvious.  She had been energetic, helping great charities, aiding in philanthropic enterprises, with more than a little shrewdness preventing him from being robbed right and left by adventurers of all descriptions; and yet—­and yet it was all so general, so soulless, her activity in good causes.  Was there a single afflicted person, one forlorn soul whom she had directly and personally helped, or sheltered from the storm for a moment, one bereaved being whose eyes she had dried by her own direct personal sympathy?

Was it this which had been more or less vaguely working in his mind a little while before when she had noticed a change in him; or was it that he was disappointed that they were two and no more—­always two, and no more?  Was it that which was working in his mind, and making him say hard things about their own two commendable selves?

“If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers....  And now you come down through the centuries purlfied by Time, to be my jasmine-flower”—­