ons' which to her awestruck
childish sense would often seem to hold him in their silent walks among
the misty hills.

Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognise these states
of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to shrink more and more
sensitively while they lasted from any collision with her. He kept his
work, his friends, his engagements to himself, talking resolutely of
other things, she trying to do the same, but with less success, as her
nature was less pliant than his.

Then there would come moments when the inward preoccupation would give
way, and that strong need of loving, which was, after all, the basis of
Catherine's character, would break hungrily through, and the wife of
their early married days would reappear, though still only with
limitations. A certain nervous physical dread of any approach to a
particular range of subjects with her husband was always present in her.
Nay, through all these months it gradually increased in morbid strength.
Shock had produced it; perhaps shock alone could loosen the stifling
pressure of it. But still every now and then her mood was brighter, more
caressing, and the area of common mundane interests seemed suddenly to
broaden for them.

Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier times; he was
incessantly possessed with his old idea that if she only _would_ allow
herself some very ordinary intercourse with his world, her mood would
become less strained, his occupations and his friends would cease to be
such bugbears to her, and, for his comfort and hers, she might
ultimately be able to sympathise with certain sides at any rate of his
work.

So again and again, when her manner no longer threw him back on himself,
he made efforts and experiments. But he managed them far less cleverly
than he would have managed anybody else's affairs, as generally happens.
For instance, at a period when he was feeling more enthusiasm than usual
for his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine was more accessible than
usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort to bring them
together. Brought face to face, each _must_ recognise the nobleness of
the other. He felt boyishly confident of it. So he made it a point,
tenderly but insistently, that Catherine should ask Wardlaw and his wife
to come and see them. And Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to
yield in something, which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded
in this.

The Wardlaws