by his sound,
well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such
miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of
confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the
plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.
Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She
asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a
satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could
he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many
hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so
tired!

It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and
without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither
tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted
from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with
it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of
emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to
spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this,
felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it
showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not
blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete
ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the
girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no
way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had
made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were
necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household
administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to
spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and
consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's
conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any
means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount
possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to
an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague
aspiration toward an ideal--an aspiration that came to her clearly only
at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at
rest.

She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar
perplexities when a trifling incident, so sma