at for him to
try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared
for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience, while
he admired, with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, all the wrong
pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes
aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly
book,--watered Dumas, as a rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw
that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot--the hall and
dining-room bristled with trophies, one walked over them everywhere--and
she looked at pictures of them in the books of travel he eagerly put
before her; but it was as pictures that they interested her, remotely,
not as animals suitable for shooting.

Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a
very gracefully affectionate husband; his manners were as charming as
his mind was blundering; but with this chill young nymph any attempt at
marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and grotesque. With Milly,
he soon felt it, the barrier between their minds was inevitably a
barrier shutting him out from even these manifestations of tenderness.
He was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick
withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he
were not to withdraw the distaste would become more than negative. He
had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a
failure and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant
wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to
make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not dislike
him at all--at a distance; and, very gaily, with a debonair manner of
perfect trust, he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, and it
was rarely that he required her to pour out his tea for him.

Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit
to Chawlton House, the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked forward
to meeting her friend's inappropriate husband almost with trembling. She
felt that she might be called to the great and happy mission of
reconciliation, that Milly might have been mistaken and Dick
undervalued. Milly's trust in her and dependence upon her had grown with
leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with tact and time she might do
much to rebuild the broken life, if there were materials with which to
build it. The first