Lethbury was in fact going through a rapid process of readjustment.
His marriage had been a failure, but he had preserved toward his
wife the exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to excuse
any divagation of feeling; so that, for years, the tie between them
had consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other
women. The abstention had not always been easy, for the world is
surprisingly well-stocked with the kind of woman one ought to have
married but did not; and Lethbury had not escaped the solicitation
of such alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of
taking refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his
perceptions; and his world being thus limited, he had given unusual
care to its details, compensating himself for the narrowness of his
horizon by the minute finish of his foreground. It was a world of
fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a
blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an
intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally
remained uninvited. The diet would have disagreed with her, and she
would probably have objected to the other guests. But Lethbury,
miscalculating her needs, had hitherto supposed that he had made
ample provision for them, and was consequently at liberty to enjoy
his own fare without any reproach of mendicancy at his gates. Now he
beheld her pressing a starved face against the windows of his life,
and in his imaginative reaction he invested her with a pathos
borrowed from the sense of his own shortcomings.
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