im inexpressibly; to become aware that she regarded him
with disgust, only kept under by fear, was to receive light on many
things besides the personal relations between himself and her. If he had
not in reality regarded her at any time with strong feeling, what had
made him so bent on gaining her for his wife? To puzzle this over--the
problem would not quit his mind--was to become dimly aware of what he
had hoped for and what he had missed. It was not her affection: he felt
that the absence of this was not the worst thing he had to bear.
Gradually he came to understand that he had been deceived by
artificialities which mocked the image of something for which he really
longed, and that something was refinement, within and without, a life
directed by other motives and desires than those he had known, a spirit
aiming at things he did not understand, yet which he would gladly have
had explained to him. There followed resentment of the deceit that had
been practised on him; the woman had been merely caught by his money,
and it followed that she was contemptible. Instead of a higher, he had
wedded a lower than himself; she did not care even to exercise the
slight hypocrisy by which she might have kept his admiration; the
cruelest feature of the wrong he had suffered was that, by the
disclosure of her unworthiness, his wife was teaching him the real value
of that which he had aimed at blindly and so deplorably failed to gain.
Dagworthy had a period almost of despair; it was then that, in an access
of fury, he committed the brutality which created so many myths about
his domestic life. To be hauled into the police-court, and to be well
aware what Dunfield was saying about him, was not exactly an agreeable
experience, but it had, like his marriage, an educational value; he knew
that the thrashing administered to the groom had been a vicarious one,
and this actively awakened sense of a possible inner meaning of things
was not without its influence upon him. It was remarked that he heard
the imposition of his fine with a suppressed laugh. Dunfield, repeating
the story with florid circumstance, of course viewed it as an
illustration of his debauched state of mind; in reality the laugh came
of a perception of the solemn absurdity of the proceedings, and Richard
was by so much the nearer to understanding himself and the world.

His wife's death came as an unhoped-for relief; he felt like a man
beginning the world anew. He had no lean