afterwards for the sense of
constraint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke with
Robert.

He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a creature so mobile,
so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should have fallen in love with
this stately silent woman, with her very evident rigidities of thought
and training, was only another illustration of the mysteries of
matrimony. He could not get on with her, and after a while did not try
to do so.

There could be no doubt as to Elsmere's devotion. He was absorbed,
wrapped up in her.

'She has affected him,' thought the tutor, 'at a period of life when he
is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong than by the
difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch of religious genius
in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine wind. One can see him
expanding, glowing under it. _Bien!_ sooner he than I. To be fair,
however, let me remember that she decidedly does not like me--which may
cut me off from Elsmere. However'--and Langham sighed over his
fire--'what have he and I to do with one another in the future? By all
the laws of character something untoward might come out of this
marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will
have children--and that solves most things.'

Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people,
Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under his
careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old
friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange, than ever; the
points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number
term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for
the retention of his post, and he spoke with wholesale distaste of his
pupils. He had set up a book on 'The Schools of Athens,' but when Robert
saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly
understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a
difficult fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been
intimate. Now, Langham's tone _a propos_ of Grey's politics and Grey's
dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard
to most of the strenuous things of life. 'Nothing particular is true,'
his manner said, 'and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through
the day somehow, with as little harm