telligence--which means, of course, power to perceive spiritual
truths. Yet such persons seem capable of going through a long life
without once feeling the impulse to worship, to render thanks and
praise to the Supreme Being. I suppose they very early deaden their
spiritual faculties; perhaps by loose habits of life, or by the
indulgence of excessive self-esteem, or by----"

Jerome made a quick gesture with his hands, as if defending himself
against a blow; then he turned to his wife, and regarded her fixedly.

"Will it take you much longer," he asked, with obvious struggle for
self-command, but speaking courteously, "to exhaust this theme?"

"It annoys you?" said the lady, very coldly, straightening herself to
an offended attitude.

"I confess it does. Or rather, it worries me. If I may beg----"

"I understood you to invite me to your room."

"I did. And the fact of my having done so ought, I should think, to
have withheld you from assailing me with your acrid tedium."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Otway, as she rose to her full height. "I will
leave you to your own tedium, which must be acrid enough, I imagine, to
judge from the face you generally wear."

And she haughtily withdrew.

A scene of this kind--never more violent, always checked at the right
moment--occurred between them about once every month. During the rest
of their time they lived without mutual aggression; seldom conversing,
but maintaining the externals of ordinary domestic intercourse. Nor was
either of them acutely unhappy. The old man (Jerome Otway was
sixty-five, but might have been taken for seventy) did not, as a rule,
wear a sour countenance; he seldom smiled, but his grave air had no
cast of gloominess; it was profoundly meditative, tending often to the
rapture of high vision. The lady had her own sufficient pursuits, chief
among them a rigid attention to matters ecclesiastical, local and
national. That her husband held notably aloof from such interests was
the subject of Mrs. Otway's avowed grief, and her peculiar method of
assailing his position brought about the periodical disturbance which
seemed on the whole an agreeable feature of her existence.

He lived much in the past, brooding upon his years of activity as
author, journalist, lecturer, conspirator, between 1846 and 1870. He
talked in his long days of silence with men whose names are written in
history, men whom he had familiarly known, with whom he had struggled
and hoped for t