It was so well defined; and if the round was small, that only meant that there was no room in it for borderlands and other obscure and undesirable places.  The commercial world, so terrifying in its approaches, remained, and always would remain, outside it.  Sitting in Mrs. Eliott’s drawing-room she forgot that the soul of Scale on Humber was given over to tallow, and to timber, and Dutch cheeses.  But for her constant habit of depreciation, she could almost have forgotten that her husband was only a ship-owner, and a ship-owner who had gone into a horrible partnership with Lawson Hannay.  It appeased her to belittle him by comparisons.  He had no spiritual fineness and fire like Canon Wharton, no intellectual interests like Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner.  She had long ago noticed his inability to converse with any brilliance; she was now aware of the heaviness, the physical slowness, that was growing on him.  He was losing the personal distinction that had charmed her once, and made her proud to be seen with him at gatherings of the fastidious in Thurston Square.

Her fancy, still belittling him, ranked him now with the dull business men of Scale.  In a few years, she said, he will be like Lawson Hannay.

A change was coming over her.  She was no longer apathetic.  Now that she saw less of her husband she thought more frequently of him, if only to his disparagement.  At times the process was unconscious; at times, when she caught her thoughts dealing thus uncharitably with him, she was touched by a pang of contrition and of shame.  At times she was pulled up in her thinking with a sudden shock.  She said to herself that he used to be so different, and her heart would turn gently to the man he used to be.  Then, as in the sad days of her bridal home-coming, the dear immortal memory of him rose up before her, and pleaded mercy for the insufferably mortal man.  She saw him, with the body and the soul that had been once so familiar to her, slender, alert, and strong, a creature of appealing goodness and tenderness and charm.  And she was troubled with a great longing for the presence of the thing she had so loved.  She yearned even for signs of the old brilliant, startling personality, in face of the growing dulness that she saw.  She found herself recalling with a smile sayings of his that had once vexed and now amused her.  For Anne was softer.

At times she was aware of a new source of uneasiness.  She was accustomed to judge all things in relation to the spiritual life.  She had no other measure of their excellence.  She had found profit for her soul in its divorce from her husband.  She had persuaded herself that since she could not raise him, she herself would have sunk if she had clung to him or let him cling.  She had felt that their tragic rupture strengthened the tie between her soul and God.  But more than once lately, she had experienced difficulty in reaching her refuge, her place of peace.  Something threatened her former inviolable security.