Constance wanted to please him; she lived for nothing but to please him; he was, however, exceedingly difficult to please, not in the least because he was hypercritical and exacting, but because he was indifferent.  Constance, in order to satisfy her desire of pleasing, had to make fifty efforts, in the hope that he might chance to notice one.  He was a good man, amazingly industrious—­when once Constance had got him out of bed in the morning; with no vices; kind, save when Constance mistakenly tried to thwart him; charming, with a curious strain of humour that Constance only half understood.  Constance was unquestionably vain about him, and she could honestly find in him little to blame.  But whereas he was the whole of her universe, she was merely a dim figure in the background of his.  Every now and then, with his gentle, elegant raillery, he would apparently rediscover her, as though saying:  “Ah!  You’re still there, are you?” Constance could not meet him on the plane where his interests lay, and he never knew the passionate intensity of her absorption in that minor part of his life which moved on her plane.  He never worried about her solitude, or guessed that in throwing her a smile and a word at supper he was paying her meagrely for three hours of lone rocking in a rocking-chair.

The worst of it was that she was quite incurable.  No experience would suffice to cure her trick of continually expecting him to notice things which he never did notice.  One day he said, in the midst of a silence:  “By the way, didn’t father leave any boxes of cigars?” She had the steps up into her bedroom and reached down from the dusty top of the wardrobe the box which she had put there after Samuel’s funeral.  In handing him the box she was doing a great deed.  His age was nineteen and she was ratifying his precocious habit of smoking by this solemn gift.  He entirely ignored the box for several days.  She said timidly:  “Have you tried those cigars?” “Not yet,” he replied.  “I’ll try ’em one of these days.”  Ten days later, on a Sunday when he chanced not to have gone out with his aristocratic friend Matthew Peel-Swynnerton, he did at length open the box and take out a cigar.  “Now,” he observed roguishly, cutting the cigar, “we shall see, Mrs. Plover!” He often called her Mrs. Plover, for fun.  Though she liked him to be sufficiently interested in her to tease her, she did not like being called Mrs. Plover, and she never failed to say:  “I’m not Mrs. Plover.”  He smoked the cigar slowly, in the rocking-chair, throwing his head back and sending clouds to the ceiling.  And afterwards he remarked:  “The old man’s cigars weren’t so bad.”  “Indeed!” she answered tartly, as if maternally resenting this easy patronage.  But in secret she was delighted.  There was something in her son’s favourable verdict on her husband’s cigars that thrilled her.

And she looked at him.  Impossible to see in him any resemblance to his father!  Oh!  He was a far more brilliant, more advanced, more complicated, more seductive being than his homely father!  She wondered where he had come from.  And yet ...!  If his father had lived, what would have occurred between them?  Would the boy have been openly smoking cigars in the house at nineteen?