ugh, and the wife
of their early married days would reappear, though still only with
limitations. A certain nervous physical dread of any approach to a
particular range of subjects with her husband was always present in her.
Nay, through all these months it gradually increased in morbid strength.
Shock had produced it; perhaps shock alone could loosen the stiffing
pressure of it. But still every now and then her mood was brighter, more
caressing, and the area of common mundane interests seemed suddenly to
broaden for them.

Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier times; he was
incessantly possessed with his old idea that if she only would allow
herself some very ordinary intercourse with his world, her mood would
become less strained, his occupations and his friends would cease to
be such bugbears to her, and, for his comfort and hers, she might
ultimately be able to sympathize with certain sides at any rate of his
work.

So again and again, when her manner no longer threw him back on himself,
he made efforts and experiments. But he managed them far less cleverly
than he would have managed anybody else's affairs, as generally happens.
For instance, at a period when he was feeling more enthusiasm than usual
for his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine was more accessible than
usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort to bring them
together. Brought face to face, each _must_ recognize the nobleness
of the other. He felt boyishly confident of it. So he made it a point,
tenderly but insistently, that Catherine should ask Wardlaw and his wife
to come and see them. And Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to
yield in something, which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded
in this.

The Wardlaws, who in general never went into society, were asked to a
quiet dinner in Bedford Square, and came. Then, of course, it appeared
that Robert, with the idealist blindness, had forgotten a hundred small
differences of temperament and training which must make it impossible
for Catherine, in a state of tension, to see the hero in James Wardlaw.
It was an unlucky dinner. James Wardlaw, with all his heroisms and
virtues, had long ago dropped most of those delicate intuitions and
divinations, which make the charm of life in society, along the rough
paths of a strenuous philanthropy. He had no tact, and, like most
saints, he drew a certain amount of inspiration from a contented
ignorance of his neighbo