xercised on
wide verandahs. His smooth round head, with the particular shade of
its white hair, was like a silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the
bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The hollows of
his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes within them, were like
little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew everything that could
be known about life, which he regarded as, for far the greater part, a
matter of pecuniary arrangement. His wife accused him of a want, alike,
of moral and of intellectual reaction, or rather indeed of a complete
incapacity for either. He never went even so far as to understand what
she meant, and it didn't at all matter, since he could be in spite
of the limitation a perfectly social creature. The infirmities, the
predicaments of men neither surprised nor shocked him, and indeed--which
was perhaps his only real loss in a thrifty career--scarce even amused;
he took them for granted without horror, classifying them after their
kind and calculating results and chances. He might, in old bewildering
climates, in old campaigns of cruelty and license, have had such
revelations and known such amazements that he had nothing more to
learn. But he was wholly content, in spite of his fondness, in domestic
discussion, for the superlative degree; and his kindness, in the oddest
way, seemed to have nothing to do with his experience. He could deal
with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near them.

This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose
meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited, for their general economy,
the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a
pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least
of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps
too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect
penetration. His connection with it was really a master-piece of
editing. This was in fact, to come back, very much the process he might
have been proposing to apply to Mrs. Assingham's view of what was
now before them; that is to their connection with Charlotte Stant's
possibilities. They wouldn't lavish on them all their little fortune
of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn't spend their cherished
savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte, moreover, who was a
smooth and compact inmate, and whom he felt as, with her instincts that
made against