Wilfrid had foreseen and dreaded this questioning.  From any woman it was sooner or later to be expected, and Beatrice was as exacting as she was passionate.  She knew herself, and strove hard to subdue these characteristics which might be displeasing to Wilfrid; her years of hopelessness, of perpetual self-restraint, were of aid to her now; three months had passed without a word from her which directly revived the old sorrows.  Her own fear of trenching on indiscretion found an ally in Wilfrid’s habitual gravity; her remark, at their meeting, on his mood was in allusion to a standing pleasantry between them; she had complained that he seldom looked really happy in her presence.  It was true; his bearing as a rule was more than sober.  Beatrice tormented herself to explain this.  He was not in ordinary intercourse so persistently serious, though far more so than he had been in earlier years, the change dating, as Beatrice too well had marked, from the time of his supreme misery.  With the natural and becoming gravity of mature age there mingled a very perceptible strain of melancholy.  You felt it in his laugh, which was seldom hearty; it made his sprightliness in social hours more self-conscious than it might have been.  Beatrice had always felt towards him a very real humility, even when the goading of her unrequited love drove her into a show of scornful opposition.  Herself conscious of but average intelligence, and without studious inclinations, she endowed him with acquisitions as vast as they were vague to her discernment; she knew that it would always lie beyond her power to be his intellectual companion.  Therefore she desired to be before everything womanly in his eyes, to make the note of pure sentiment predominate in their private relations to each other.  She had but won him by her artistic faculty; she could not depend upon that to retain and deepen his affection.  Her constant apprehension was lest familiarity should diminish her charm in his eyes.  Wilfrid was no less critical than he had ever been; she suspected that he required much of her.  Did he seek more than she would eventually be able to give?  Was she exhausting the resources of her personal charm?  Such thoughts as these made curious alternations in her manner towards him; one day she would endeavour to support a reserve which should surpass his own, another she lost herself in bursts of emotion.  The very care which she bestowed upon her personal appearance was a result of her anxiety on this point; in the last resort she knew herself to be beautiful, and to her beauty he was anything but insensible.  Yet such an influence was wretchedly insufficient; she must have his uttermost love, and never yet had she attained full assurance of possessing it.