ad cast an abiding gloom upon his manner.

"A woman like his wife couldn't have asked a better foil; yet I'm sure
she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She
may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve
was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you
said she was rare) of looking at facts as they are, without any throwing
of sentimental lime-lights. She knew Trant could no more help being
Trant than she could help being herself--and there was an end of it.
I've never known a woman who 'made up' so little mentally....

"Perhaps her very reserve, the fierceness of her implicit rejection of
sympathy, exposed her the more to--well, to what happened when we met.
She said afterward that it was like having been shut up for months in
the hold of a ship, and coming suddenly on deck on a day that was all
flying blue and silver....

"I won't try to tell you what she was. It's easier to tell you what her
friendship made of me; and I can do that best by adopting her metaphor
of the ship. Haven't you, sometimes, at the moment of starting on a
journey, some glorious plunge into the unknown, been tripped up by the
thought: 'If only one hadn't to come back'? Well, with her one had the
sense that one would never have to come back; that the magic ship, would
always carry one farther. And what an air one breathed on it! And, oh,
the wind, and the islands, and the sunsets!

"I said just now 'her friendship'; and I used the word advisedly. Love
is deeper than friendship, but friendship is a good deal wider. The
beauty of our relation was that it included both dimensions. Our
thoughts met as naturally as our eyes: it was almost as if we loved each
other because we liked each other. The quality of a love may be tested
by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no
dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them,
no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell
back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed
account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the
proof....

"For the first months friendship sufficed us, or rather gave us so much
by the way that we were in no hurry to reach what we knew it was
leading to. But we were moving there nevertheless, and one day we found
ourselves on the borders. It came about through a sudden decision of
Trant's t