that he had made a certain place in his life for Mrs. Lethbury, and that she no longer fitted into it.  It was too late to enlarge the space, and so she overflowed and encroached.  Lethbury struggled against the sense of submergence.  He let down barrier after barrier, yielded privacy after privacy; but his wife’s personality continued to dilate.  She was no longer herself alone:  she was herself and Jane.  Gradually, in a monstrous fusion of identity, she became herself, himself and Jane; and instead of trying to adapt her to a spare crevice of his character, he found himself carelessly squeezed into the smallest compartment of the domestic economy.

IV

He continued to tell himself that he was satisfied if his wife was happy; and it was not till the child’s tenth year that he felt a doubt of her happiness.

Jane had been a preternaturally good child.  During the eight years of her adoption she had caused her foster-parents no anxiety beyond those connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases.  But her unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she passed unperturbed through measles, chicken-pox and whooping-cough.  If there was any suffering it was endured vicariously by Mrs. Lethbury, whose temperature rose and fell with the patient’s, and who could not hear Jane sneeze without visions of a marble angel weeping over a broken column.  But though Jane’s prompt recoveries continued to belie such premonitions, though her existence continued to move forward on an even keel of good health and good conduct, Mrs. Lethbury’s satisfaction showed no corresponding advance.  Lethbury, at first, was disposed to add her disappointment to the long list of feminine inconsistencies with which the sententious observer of life builds up his favorite induction; but circumstances presently led him to take a kindlier view of the case.

Hitherto his wife had regarded him as a negligible factor in Jane’s evolution.  Beyond providing for his adopted daughter, and effacing himself before her, he was not expected to contribute to her well-being.  But as time passed he appeared to his wife in a new light.  It was he who was to educate Jane.  In matters of the intellect, Mrs. Lethbury was the first to declare her deficiencies—­to proclaim them, even, with a certain virtuous superiority.  She said she did not pretend to be clever, and there was no denying the truth of the assertion.  Now, however, she seemed less ready, not to own her limitations, but to glory in them.  Confronted with the problem of Jane’s instruction, she stood in awe of the child.

“I have always been stupid, you know,” she said to Lethbury with a new humility, “and I’m afraid I sha’n’t know what is best for Jane.  I’m sure she has a wonderfully good mind, and I should reproach myself if I didn’t give her every opportunity.”  She looked at him helplessly.  “You must tell me what ought to be done.”