Creston, if the man to whom she had given everything couldn't. He
had known her twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he
might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was all cleverness and
sympathy and charm; her house had been the very easiest in all the
world and her friendship the very firmest. Without accidents he
had loved her, without accidents every one had loved her: she had
made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the tides.
She had been also of course far too good for her husband, but he
never suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than
in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else
(keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out. Here was a
man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had given it
up--dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had
had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on
her grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had
replaced. The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes
fill; and he had that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a
world without delicacy, had a right to hold up his head. While he
smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes
for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to
have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he
looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it
to be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of how the
closed eyes of dead women could still live--how they could open
again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last. They had looks that survived--had them as great poets had
quoted lines.

The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the
afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for