s the one decisive incident of his career; from that
moment until the day of his death he had one thought to which all the
rest were tributary, the thought of his wife. No one could know him even
slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor
can any picture of the man be drawn that does not in proportion dwell
upon it. This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as
we wish) some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that
must be undertaken.

For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence--and, as time
went on, he grew indulgent--Fleeming had views of duty that were even
stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-men to remain long
content with rigid formulae of conduct. Iron-bound, impersonal ethics,
the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the
deification of averages. "As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being
bad," I find him writing, "people only mean that she has broken the
Decalogue--which is not at all the same thing. People who have kept in
the high road of Life really have less opportunity for taking a
comprehensive view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and
strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and
our stray travellers often have a weary time of it. So, you may say,
have those in the dusty roads." Yet he was himself a very stern
respecter of the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in the
obvious path of conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised
duty of his epoch. Of marriage in particular, of the bond so formed, of
the obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he
conceived in a truly antique spirit; not to blame others, but to
constrain himself. It was not to blame, I repeat, that he held these
views; for others he could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly
expected of his friends and his wife a high standard of behaviour. Nor
was it always easy to wear the armour of that ideal.

Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed "given himself"
(in the full meaning of these words) for better, for worse; painfully
alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make
up for these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the
very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of an unfortunate marriage.
In other ways, it is true, he was one of the most unfit for such a
trial. And it was his bea