eevish complaints and
vagaries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she did
what was wise and right. Their marriage was hallowed by an early
sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before they could look
each other in the face and speak of him. No one gave up more than they
when they gave up each other and Lapham went to the war. When he came
back and began to work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his
enterprise. In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his
conscience, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had accused
himself; it was one of those things in this life which seem destined to
await justice, or at least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham
had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more
money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said,
simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in
advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all.
He had been dependent at one time on his partner's capital. It was a
moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can
choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could
not rise to it. He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair.
The wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when from time
to time his wife brought it up. Then all the question stung and burned
anew, and had to be reasoned out and put away once more. It seemed to
have an inextinguishable vitality. It slept, but it did not die.

His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham's faith in him. It astonished her
at first, and it always grieved her that he could not see that he was
acting solely in his own interest. But she found excuses for him,
which at times she made reproaches. She vaguely perceived that his
paint was something more than business to him; it was a sentiment,
almost a passion. He could not share its management and its profit
with another without a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which
he must make with something less personal to him. It was the poetry of
that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood this,
and for the most part forbore. She knew him good and true and
blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it were a wrong;
and it was only when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance
renewal of the pain she had suffered, that she shared her anguish with
him in true