esuming his
patronymic of Durrant, but reflected that he was too well known to
don that cloak of transparent darkness without giving currency to
the idea that he had soiled the other past longer wearing. It would
be imagined, he said, picking out one dishonesty of which he had not
been guilty, that he had settled money on his wife, and retired to
enjoy it.

His condition was far more pitiful than his situation. Having no
faculty for mental occupation except with affairs, finding nothing
to do but cleave, like a spent sailor, with hands and feet to the
slippery rock of what was once his rectitude, such as it was, trying
to hold it still his own, he would sit for hours without moving--a
perfect creature, temple, god, and worshipper, all in one--only that
the worshipper was hardly content with his god, and that a worm was
gnawing on at the foundation of the temple. Nearly as motionless,
her hands excepted, would Ginevra sit opposite to him, not quieter
but more peaceful than when a girl, partly because now she was less
afraid of him. He called her, in his thoughts as he sat there,
heartless and cold, but not only was she not so, but it was his
fault that she appeared to him such. In his moral stupidity he
would rather have seen her manifest concern at the poverty to which
he had reduced her, than show the stillness of a contented mind.
She was not much given to books, but what she read was worth
reading, and such as turned into thought while she sat. They are
not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be
got out of them is at best only material: a man must build his house
for himself. She would have read more, but with her father beside
her doing nothing, she felt that to take a book would be like going
into a warm house, and leaving him out in the cold. It was very sad
to her to see him thus shrunk and withered, and lost in thought that
plainly was not thinking. Nothing interested him; he never looked
at the papers, never cared to hear a word of news. His eyes more
unsteady, his lips looser, his neck thinner and longer, he looked
more than ever like a puppet whose strings hung slack. How often
would Ginevra have cast herself on his bosom if she could have even
hoped he would not repel her! Now and then his eyes did wander to
her in a dazed sort of animal-like appeal, but the moment she
attempted response, he turned into a corpse. Still, when it came,
that look was a comfort, for it se