moment he did advertise an
interest it should show almost as what she would have called weird. It
made a change in him that didn't go with the rest--as if he had broken
his nose or put on spectacles, lost his handsome hair or sacrificed
his splendid mustache: her conception, her necessity, as she saw, had
been that something should be added to him for her use, but nothing
for his own alteration.

He had affirmed himself, and his character, and his temper, and his
health, and his appetite, and his ignorance, and his obstinacy, and
his whole charming, coarse, heartless personality, during their
engagement, by twenty forms of natural emphasis, but never by emphasis
of interest. How in fact could you feel interest unless you should
know, within you, some dim stir of imagination? There was nothing in
the world of which Murray Brush was less capable than of such a dim
stir, because you only began to imagine when you felt some approach to
a need to understand. _He_ had never felt it; for hadn't he been born,
to his personal vision, with that perfect intuition of everything
which reduces all the suggested preliminaries of judgment to the
impertinence--when it's a question of your entering your house--of
a dumpage of bricks at your door? He had had, in short, neither to
imagine nor to perceive, because he had, from the first pulse of his
intelligence, simply and supremely known: so that, at this hour,
face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old
relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his
part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore
must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity
and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could
have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and
functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery,
and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture of
possession and detachment as they would clearly to-day both know.
For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months
together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for
each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other--what was it
monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by
going to lock yourself up in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of that person's
house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What
was going to happen, at any rat