really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a something
as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and
perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Oke
as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. I
neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I
had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her on
the brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological
explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented my
ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were
but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a
guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a
sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our
walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly
dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his
wife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgment
in these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quite
simple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonous
life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than
of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in
this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I
often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the
interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great
portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,--the type of the
perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have
been the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave,
incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled by
all manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of his
political party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. He
spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and a