have brought our acquaintance to a close. But I soon saw there was
nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was (in
addition to the chance of being wanted), simply because he had
nothing else to do. When she was away from him his occupation was
gone--she never HAD been away from him. I judged, rightly, that in
their awkward situation their close union was their main comfort and
that this union had no weak spot. It was a real marriage, an
encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack.
Their address was humble (I remember afterwards thinking it had been
the only thing about them that was really professional), and I could
fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left
alone. He could bear them with his wife--he couldn't bear them
without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he
couldn't be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too
absorbed in my work to talk. But I liked to make him talk--it made
my work, when it didn't interrupt it, less sordid, less special. To
listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the
economy of staying at home. There was only one hindrance: that I
seemed not to know any of the people he and his wife had known. I
think he wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom
the deuce I DID know. He hadn't a stray sixpence of an idea to
fumble for; so we didn't spin it very fine--we confined ourselves to
questions of leather and even of liquor (saddlers and breeches-makers
and how to get good claret cheap), and matters like "good trains" and
the habits of small game. His lore on these last subjects was
astonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master with the
ornithologist. When he couldn't talk about greater things he could
talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn't accompany him