e, half economy and half coquetry,
with the Chinese dress. He was still more touched by the gesture of
extinguishing a light. For a year or two past Mrs. Prohack had been
putting forward a theory that an average degree of illumination tried
her eyes, and the household was now accustomed to twilit rooms in the
evening. Mr. Prohack knew that the recent taste for obscurity had
nothing to do with her eyes and everything to do with her years, but he
pretended to be deceived by her duplicity. Not for millions would he
have given her cause to suspect that he was not perfectly deceived. He
understood and sympathised with her in all her manifestations. He did
not select choice pieces of her character for liking, and dislike or
disapprove of the rest. He took her undivided, unchipped, and liked the
whole of her. It was very strange.

When he married her he had assumed, but was not sure, that he loved her.
For thirteen or fourteen years she had endangered the bond between them
by what seemed to him to be her caprices, illogicalities, perversities,
and had saved it by her charming demonstrations of affection. During
this period he had remained as it were neutral--an impassive spectator
of her union with a man who happened to be himself. He had observed and
weighed all her faults, and had concluded that she was not worse than
other wives whom he respected. He continued to wonder what it was that
held them together. At length, and very slowly indeed, he had begun to
have a revelation, not of her but of himself. He guessed that he must be
profoundly in love with her and that his original assumption was much
more than accurate,--it was a bull's-eye. His love developed into a
passion, not one of your eruptive, scalding affairs, but something as
placid as an English landscape, with white heat far, far below the
surface.

He felt how fine and amusing it was to have a genuine, incurable,
illogical passion for a woman,--a passion that was almost an instinct.
He deliberately cultivated it and dwelt on it and enjoyed it. He liked
reflecting upon it. He esteemed that it must be about the most
satisfying experience in the entire realm of sentiment, and that no
other earthly experience of any sort could approach it. He made this
discovery for himself, with the same sensations as if he had discovered
a new star or the circulation of the blood. Of course he knew that
two-thirds of the imaginative literature of the world was based on, and
illustr