on a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy
had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an
arid spot in her soul.

Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no
difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner
history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at
Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to
conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of
both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two
concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural
points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot
nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative
joys.

There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she
suspected that he had once been hard to his mother--as the leader of men
must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to
his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some
capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her
own with which to fill their days.

Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a
flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and
in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to
make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman,
he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the
bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of
the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery
that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets"
imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of
the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy
there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only
in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm
afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page.
Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily
facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind
felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long
evening