' sitting after supper. They never went
anywhere now. Picture-galleries and concert-halls knew them no more. The
Debating Society at Hampstead had long ago missed the faithful,
inseparable pair--the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background
listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed,
after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane.
Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel's trump
had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused him
from his apathy.

And as they never went to see anybody, nobody ever came to see them. The
Hampstead ladies found Aggie dull and her conversation monotonous. It was
all about Arthur and the babies; and those ladies cared little for Arthur,
and for the babies less. Of Aggie's past enthusiasm they said that it was
nothing but a pose. Time had revealed her, the sunken soul of patience and
of pathos, the beast of burden, the sad-eyed, slow, and gray.

The spirit of the place, too, had departed, leaving a decomposing and
discolored shell. The beloved yellow villa had disclosed the worst side of
its nature. The brown wall-paper had peeled and blistered, like an
unwholesome skin. The art serge had faded; the drugget was dropping to
pieces, worn with many feet; the wood-work had shrunk more than ever, and
draughts, keen as knives, cut through the rooms and passages. The "Hope"
and the "Love Leading Life" and the "Love Triumphant," like imperishable
frescos in a decaying sanctuary, were pitiful survivals, testifying to the
death of dreams.

Saddest of all, the bookshelves, that were to have shot up to the ceiling,
had remained three feet from the floor, showing the abrupt arrest of the
intellectual life.

It was evident that they hadn't kept it up.

If anything, Arthur was more effaced, more obliterated, than his wife. He,
whose appearance had once suggested a remarkable personality, a poet or a
thinker, now looked what he had become, a depressed and harassed city
clerk, no more. His face was dragged by deep downward lines that
accentuated its weakness. A thin wisp of colorless mustache sheltered,
without concealing, the irritability of his mouth. Under his high, sallow
forehead, his eyes, once so spiritual, looked out on his surroundings with
more indifference than discontent. His soul fretted him no longer; it had
passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness. Only the sounds made
by