aw across a bleak sky the flight of
an unknown bird. In her own little world of fashion they had made her a
tolerably famous figure. But it was an echo only of her regrets and
longings that Christina was able to put into her poems, all perhaps that
she chose to put; they were never intimate or personal. The essence of
her was that passionate reserve and, with it, that passionate longing to
devote herself, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized and,
inevitably, idealized object. She was full of a fervour of faith, once
the reserve was broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal in its
well-built temple, was secure henceforth from overthrow.

Such an idol her husband had been. Such an idol her child would have
been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the sacred
emptiness for ever empty; Christina could never have remarried. But
beside it rose a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly
enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.

Happily Milly was an idol worthy of idealization, perhaps even worthy of
temple-building. She was sweet and tender, in friendship most upright
and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her own tenderness blossom
about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved
those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they
did. Like a frail flower, unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live
without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her
disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan
disgust. His crude appreciations of her, which, in the first girlish
trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle,
manifold appreciations that she needed, were now offences. Poor Dick
Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife's
disdain. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great
things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had
never thought about himself at all, it did not surprise him that his
wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think less
well of himself. Milly's indifference argued in her a difference from
most women, facilely contented as they usually seemed. It did not change
or harm him or make him either assertive or self-conscious.

He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied
her--sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncomplex
books; and after a little while he discovered, further, th