When he thought of Ellen
Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think
of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she
had become the composite vision of all that he had
missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept
him from thinking of other women. He had been what
was called a faithful husband; and when May had
suddenly died--carried off by the infectious pneumonia
through which she had nursed their youngest child--he
had honestly mourned her. Their long years together had
shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was
a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing
from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and
mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.
His eyes, making the round of the room--done over
by Dallas with English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets,
bits of chosen blue-and-white and pleasantly shaded
electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlake writing-
table that he had never been willing to banish, and to
his first photograph of May, which still kept its place
beside his inkstand.
There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in
her starched muslin and flapping Leghorn, as he had
seen her under the orange-trees in the Mission garden.
And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;
never quite at the same height, yet never far below it:
generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in
imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her
youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without
her ever being conscious of the change.
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