his wife.  His marriage developed the man surprisingly; it made him self-conscious in a degree he could not formerly have conceived.  He had fully believed that this woman was in love with him, and the belief had flattered him inexpressibly; to become aware that she regarded him with disgust, only kept under by fear, was to receive light on many things besides the personal relations between himself and her.  If he had not in reality regarded her at any time with strong feeling, what had made him so bent on gaining her for his wife?  To puzzle this over—­the problem would not quit his mind—­was to become dimly aware of what he had hoped for and what he had missed.  It was not her affection:  he felt that the absence of this was not the worst thing he had to bear.  Gradually he came to understand that he had been deceived by artificialities which mocked the image of something for which he really longed, and that something was refinement, within and without, a life directed by other motives and desires than those he had known, a spirit aiming at things he did not understand, yet which he would gladly have had explained to him.  There followed resentment of the deceit that had been practised on him; the woman had been merely caught by his money, and it followed that she was contemptible.  Instead of a higher, he had wedded a lower than himself; she did not care even to exercise the slight hypocrisy by which she might have kept his admiration; the cruelest feature of the wrong he had suffered was that, by the disclosure of her unworthiness, his wife was teaching him the real value of that which he had aimed at blindly and so deplorably failed to gain.  Dagworthy had a period almost of despair; it was then that, in an access of fury, he committed the brutality which created so many myths about his domestic life.  To be hauled into the police-court, and to be well aware what Dunfield was saying about him, was not exactly an agreeable experience, but it had, like his marriage, an educational value; he knew that the thrashing administered to the groom had been a vicarious one, and this actively awakened sense of a possible inner meaning of things was not without its influence upon him.  It was remarked that he heard the imposition of his fine with a suppressed laugh.  Dunfield, repeating the story with florid circumstance, of course viewed it as an illustration of his debauched state of mind; in reality the laugh came of a perception of the solemn absurdity of the proceedings, and Richard was by so much the nearer to understanding himself and the world.

His wife’s death came as an unhoped-for relief; he felt like a man beginning the world anew.  He had no leaning to melancholy, and a prolongation of his domestic troubles would not have made him less hearty in his outward bearing, but the progress of time had developed elements in his nature which were scarcely compatible with a continuance of the life he had been leading.  He had begun to put to himself