He had been touched by her manoeuvre, half economy and half coquetry, with the Chinese dress.  He was still more touched by the gesture of extinguishing a light.  For a year or two past Mrs. Prohack had been putting forward a theory that an average degree of illumination tried her eyes, and the household was now accustomed to twilit rooms in the evening.  Mr. Prohack knew that the recent taste for obscurity had nothing to do with her eyes and everything to do with her years, but he pretended to be deceived by her duplicity.  Not for millions would he have given her cause to suspect that he was not perfectly deceived.  He understood and sympathised with her in all her manifestations.  He did not select choice pieces of her character for liking, and dislike or disapprove of the rest.  He took her undivided, unchipped, and liked the whole of her.  It was very strange.

When he married her he had assumed, but was not sure, that he loved her.  For thirteen or fourteen years she had endangered the bond between them by what seemed to him to be her caprices, illogicalities, perversities, and had saved it by her charming demonstrations of affection.  During this period he had remained as it were neutral—­an impassive spectator of her union with a man who happened to be himself.  He had observed and weighed all her faults, and had concluded that she was not worse than other wives whom he respected.  He continued to wonder what it was that held them together.  At length, and very slowly indeed, he had begun to have a revelation, not of her but of himself.  He guessed that he must be profoundly in love with her and that his original assumption was much more than accurate,—­it was a bull’s-eye.  His love developed into a passion, not one of your eruptive, scalding affairs, but something as placid as an English landscape, with white heat far, far below the surface.

He felt how fine and amusing it was to have a genuine, incurable, illogical passion for a woman,—­a passion that was almost an instinct.  He deliberately cultivated it and dwelt on it and enjoyed it.  He liked reflecting upon it.  He esteemed that it must be about the most satisfying experience in the entire realm of sentiment, and that no other earthly experience of any sort could approach it.  He made this discovery for himself, with the same sensations as if he had discovered a new star or the circulation of the blood.  Of course he knew that two-thirds of the imaginative literature of the world was based on, and illustrative of, this great human discovery, and therefore that he was not exactly a pioneer.  No matter!  He was a pioneer all the same.

“Do you remember a fellow named Angmering?” he began, on a note of the closest confiding intimacy—­a note which always flattered and delighted his wife.

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“Wasn’t he the man that started to run away with Ronnie Philps’ wife and thought better of it and got her out of the train at Crewe and put her into the London train that was standing at the other platform and left her without a ticket?  Was it Crewe or Rugby—­I forget which?”