mpossible and deplorable happen as in
an endless prolongation of his nightmare; watched himself proceed, that
is, with the finest, richest incoherence, to the due preparation of his
catastrophe. Everything came to seem _equally_ part of this--in complete
defiance of proportion; even his final command of detachment, on
the bench of desolation (where each successive fact of his dire case
regularly cut itself out black, yet of senseless silhouette, against the
red west) in respect to poor Nan's flat infelicities, which for the most
part kept no pace with the years or with change, but only shook like
hard peas in a child's rattle, the same peas a ways, of course, so long
as the rattle didn't split open with usage or from somebody's act of
irritation. They represented, or they had long done so, her contribution
to the more superficial of the two branches of intimacy--the
intellectual alternative, the one that didn't merely consist of her
preparing herself for his putting his arm round her waist.

There were to have been moments, nevertheless, all the first couple of
years, when she did touch in him, though to his actively dissimulating
it, a more or less sensitive nerve--moments as they were too, to do
her justice, when she treated him not to his own wisdom, or even folly,
served up cold, but to a certain small bitter fruit of her personal,
her unnatural, plucking. "I wonder that since _she_ took legal advice
so freely, to come down on you, you didn't take it yourself, a little,
before being so sure you stood no chance. Perhaps _your_ people would
have been sure of something quite different--_perhaps_, I only say, you
know." She "only" said it, but she said it, none the less, in the early
time, about once a fortnight. In the later, and especially after their
marriage, it had a way of coming up again to the exclusion, as it seemed
to him, of almost everything else; in fact during the most dismal years,
the three of the loss of their two children, the long stretch of sordid
embarrassment ending in her death, he was afterward to think of her
as having generally said it several times a day. He was then also to
remember that his answer, before she had learnt to discount it, had been
inveterately at hand: "What would any solicitor have done or wanted to
do but drag me just into the hideous public arena"--he had always so put
it--"that it has been at any rate my pride and my honour, the one rag
of self-respect covering my nakedness,