oked unfavourably on his intervention,
she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and
emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which
she had married: Amherst's devoted _role_ at Westmore had justified the
unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more
helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the
question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which
had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her
poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but
surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his
former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of
the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus
analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month
to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and
of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the
justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it
for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of
Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich
woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such
opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural
bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined
manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as
well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously
enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of
impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet
for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury
with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for
hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he
had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and
how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had
appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for
him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had onc