his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had seen so
many other women do?

Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had never
been a calm one. Farron's interests were concentrated, and his
temperament was jealous. A woman couldn't, as Adelaide sometimes had
occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did not
always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without a
certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for they
ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a fresh
sense of his supremacy.

If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed that
something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she had
always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the full
history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, "Has anything gone
wrong, Joe?" But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult; only as
time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest became more
and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and, much more rarely,
the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly admired most about
Farron was his independence of her in such matters. No half-contemptuous
question would elicit confidence from him, so that she had come to think
it a great honor if by any chance he did drop her a hint as to the mood
that his day's work had occasioned. But for the most part he was
unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and business successes did
not seem to reach the area where he suffered or rejoiced. They were to be
dealt with or ignored, but they could neither shadow or elate him.