t down barrier after
barrier, yielded privacy after privacy; but his wife's personality
continued to dilate. She was no longer herself alone: she was herself
and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous fusion of identity, she became
herself, himself and Jane; and instead of trying to adapt her to a
spare crevice of his character, he found himself carelessly squeezed
into the smallest compartment of the domestic economy.

IV

He continued to tell himself that he was satisfied if his wife was
happy; and it was not till the child's tenth year that he felt a doubt
of her happiness.

Jane had been a preternaturally good child. During the eight years of
her adoption she had caused her foster-parents no anxiety beyond those
connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases. But her
unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she passed
unperturbed through measles, chicken-pox and whooping-cough. If there
was any suffering it was endured vicariously by Mrs. Lethbury, whose
temperature rose and fell with the patient's, and who could not hear
Jane sneeze without visions of a marble angel weeping over a broken
column. But though Jane's prompt recoveries continued to belie such
premonitions, though her existence continued to move forward on an even
keel of good health and good conduct, Mrs. Lethbury's satisfaction
showed no corresponding advance. Lethbury, at first, was disposed to
add her disappointment to the long list of feminine inconsistencies
with which the sententious observer of life builds up his favorite
induction; but circumstances presently led him to take a kindlier view
of the case.

Hitherto his wife had regarded him as a negligible factor in Jane's
evolution. Beyond providing for his adopted daughter, and effacing
himself before her, he was not expected to contribute to her
well-being. But as time passed he appeared to his wife in a new light.
It was he who was to educate Jane. In matters of the intellect, Mrs.
Lethbury was the first to declare her deficiencies--to proclaim them,
even, with a certain virtuous superiority. She said she did not pretend
to be clever, and there was no denying the truth of the assertion. Now,
however, she seemed less ready, not to own her limitations, but to
glory in them. Confronted with the problem of Jane's instruction, she
stood in awe of the child.

"I have always been stupid, you know," she said to Lethbury with a new
humility, "and I'm afraid I sha'n't kno