rly
marked personality, known some exceptional people, done a number of
interesting and a few rather difficult things, and found himself, at
thirty-seven, possessed of an intellectual ambition sufficient to occupy
the passage to a robust and energetic old age. As for the private and
personal side of his life, it had come up to the current standards, and
if it had dropped, now and then, below a more ideal measure, even these
declines had been brief, parenthetic, incidental. In the recognized
essentials he had always remained strictly within the limit of his
scruples.

From this reassuring survey of his case he came back to the
contemplation of its crowning felicity. His mind turned again to his
first meeting with Anna Summers and took up one by one the threads of
their faintly sketched romance. He dwelt with pardonable pride on
the fact that fate had so early marked him for the high privilege of
possessing her: it seemed to mean that they had really, in the truest
sense of the ill-used phrase, been made for each other.

Deeper still than all these satisfactions was the mere elemental sense
of well-being in her presence. That, after all, was what proved her to
be the woman for him: the pleasure he took in the set of her head, the
way her hair grew on her forehead and at the nape, her steady gaze when
he spoke, the grave freedom of her gait and gestures. He recalled every
detail of her face, the fine veinings of the temples, the bluish-brown
shadows in her upper lids, and the way the reflections of two stars
seemed to form and break up in her eyes when he held her close to him...

If he had had any doubt as to the nature of her feeling for him those
dissolving stars would have allayed it. She was reserved, she was shy
even, was what the shallow and effusive would call "cold". She was like
a picture so hung that it can be seen only at a certain angle: an angle
known to no one but its possessor. The thought flattered his sense
of possessorship...He felt that the smile on his lips would have been
fatuous had it had a witness. He was thinking of her look when she had
questioned him about his meeting with Owen at the theatre: less of her
words than of her look, and of the effort the question cost her: the
reddening of her cheek, the deepening of the strained line between her
brows, the way her eyes sought shelter and then turned and drew on him.
Pride and passion were in the conflict--magnificent qualities in a wife!
The sig