his soul.
Antonia's home, for instance, had been full of them. They were the
best-bred people of the sort who supported charities, knew everybody, had
clear, calm judgment, and intolerance of all such conduct as seemed to
them "impossible," all breaches of morality, such as mistakes of
etiquette, such as dishonesty, passion, sympathy (except with a canonised
class of objects--the legitimate sufferings, for instance, of their own
families and class). How healthy they were! The memory of the
doss-house worked in Shelton's mind like poison. He was conscious that
in his own groomed figure, in the undemonstrative assurance of his walk,
he bore resemblance to the couple he apostrophised. "Ah!" he thought,
"how vulgar our refinement is!" But he hardly believed in his own
outburst. These people were so well mannered, so well conducted, and so
healthy, he could not really understand what irritated him. What was the
matter with them? They fulfilled their duties, had good appetites, clear
consciences, all the furniture of perfect citizens; they merely
lacked-feelers, a loss that, he had read, was suffered by plants and
animals which no longer had a need for using them. Some rare national
faculty of seeing only the obvious and materially useful had destroyed
their power of catching gleams or scents to right or left.

The lady looked up at her husband. The light of quiet, proprietary
affection shone in her calm grey eyes, decorously illumining her features
slightly reddened by the wind. And the husband looked back at her, calm,
practical, protecting. They were very much alike. So doubtless he
looked when he presented himself in snowy shirt-sleeves for her to
straighten the bow of his white tie; so nightly she would look, standing
before the full-length mirror, fixing his gifts upon her bosom. Calm,
proprietary, kind! He passed them and walked behind a second less
distinguished couple, who manifested a mutual dislike as matter-of-fact
and free from nonsense as the unruffled satisfaction of the first; this
dislike was just as healthy, and produced in Shelton about the same
sensation. It was like knocking at a never-opened door, looking at a
circle--couple after couple all the same. No heads, toes, angles of
their souls stuck out anywhere. In the sea of their environments they
were drowned; no leg braved the air, no arm emerged wet and naked waving
at the skies; shop-persons, aristocrats, workmen, officials, they were