He saw himself
in the comic role of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an
expiation. For in his rapid reconstruction of the past he found
himself cutting a shabbier figure than he cared to admit. He had
always been intolerant of stupid people, and it was his punishment
to be convicted of stupidity. As his mind traversed the years
between his marriage and this unexpected assumption of paternity, he
saw, in the light of an overheated imagination, many signs of
unwonted crassness. It was not that he had ceased to think his wife
stupid: she _was_ stupid, limited, inflexible; but there was a
pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its blind reachings
toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she would have
been happier with a child; but he had thought it mechanically,
because it had so often been thought before, because it was in the
nature of things to think it of every woman, because his wife was so
eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the
generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization
as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience.
Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the
one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of
increasing complexity had operated in both sexes, and he had not
seriously supposed that, outside the world of Christmas fiction and
anecdotic art, such truisms had any special hold on the feminine
imagination. Now he saw that the arts in question were kept alive by
the vitality of the sentiments they appealed to.
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