His behaviour could have only one interpretation:  he had proposed to Mary Abbott, and she had refused him.  The longer Alma thought, the more certain she was —­ and the more irritated.  It would be very difficult to continue her civility to Mrs. Abbott after this.

CHAPTER 6

In these days Rolfe had abandoned even the pretence of study.  He could not feel at home among his books; they were ranked about him on the old shelves, but looked as uncomfortable as he himself; it seemed a temporary arrangement; he might as well have been in lodgings.  At Pinner, after a twelvemonth, he was beginning to overcome the sense of strangeness; but a foreboding that he could not long remain there had always disturbed him.  Here, though every probability pointed to a residence of at least two or three years, he scarcely made an effort to familiarise himself with the new surroundings; his house was a shelter, a camp; granted a water-tight roof, and drains not immediately poisonous, what need to take thought for artificial comforts?  Thousands of men, who sleep on the circumference of London, and go each day to business, are practically strangers to the district nominally their home; ever ready to strike tent, as convenience bids, they can feel no interest in a vicinage which merely happens to house them for the time being, and as often as not they remain ignorant of the names of streets or roads through which they pass in going to the railway station.  Harvey was now very much in this case.  That he might not utterly waste his time, he had undertaken regular duties under Cecil Morphew’s direction, and spent some hours daily in Westminster Bridge Road.  Thence he went to his club, to see the papers; and in returning to Gunnersbury he felt hardly more sense of vital connection with this suburb than with the murky and roaring street in which he sat at business.  By force of habit he continued to read, but only books from the circulating library, thrown upon his table pell-mell —­ novels, popular science, travels, biographies; each as it came to hand.  The intellectual disease of the time took hold upon him:  he lost the power of mental concentration, yielded to the indolent pleasure of desultory page-skimming.  There remained in him but one sign of grace:  the qualms that followed on every evening’s debauch of mind, the headachey impression that he was going through a morbid experience which somehow would work its own cure.

Alma seemed quite unaware of any change in him.  To his physical comfort she gave all due attention, anxious lest he should catch cold in this hideous weather, and doing her best to rule the house as he desired; but his intellectual life was no concern to her.  Herein, of course, Harvey did but share the common lot of men married; he recognised the fact, and was too wise to complain of it, even in his own mind.  Yet it puzzled him a little, now and then, that a woman so intelligent as Alma should in this respect be simply on a level with the brainless multitude of her sex.  One evening, when they were together in his room, he took down a volume, and blew the dust off it, saying as he did so ——­