made friends with were distasteful to him; and, without complaining, he
soon grew to think it intolerable that a woman married to a soldier
should care so little for his professional interests and ambitions.
Though when she pretended to care for them she annoyed him, if possible,
still more.

As for Lady Rose, she went through all the familiar emotions of the
_femme incomprise_. And with the familiar result. There presently
appeared in the house a man of good family, thirty-five or so,
traveller, painter, and dreamer, with fine, long-drawn features bronzed
by the sun of the East, and bringing with him the reputation of having
plotted and fought for most of the "lost causes" of our generation,
including several which had led him into conflict with British
authorities and British officials. To Colonel Delaney he was an
"agitator," if not a rebel; and the careless pungency of his talk soon
classed him as an atheist besides. In the case of Lady Rose, this man's
free and generous nature, his independence of money and convention, his
passion for the things of the mind, his contempt for the mode, whether
in dress or politics, his light evasions of the red tape of life as of
something that no one could reasonably expect of a vagabond like
himself--these things presently transformed a woman in despair to a
woman in revolt. She fell in love with an intensity befitting her true
temperament, and with a stubbornness that bore witness to the dreary
failure of her marriage. Marriott Dalrymple returned her love, and
nothing in his view of life predisposed him to put what probably
appeared to him a mere legality before the happiness of two people meant
for each other. There were no children of the Delaney marriage; and in
his belief the husband had enjoyed too long a companionship he had never
truly deserved.