Lethbury, and that she no longer fitted
into it. It was too late to enlarge the space, and so she overflowed
and encroached. Lethbury struggled against the sense of submergence.
He let down barrier after barrier, yielded privacy after privacy;
but his wife's personality continued to dilate. She was no longer
herself alone: she was herself and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous
fusion of identity, she became herself, himself and Jane; and
instead of trying to adapt her to a spare crevice of his character,
he found himself carelessly squeezed into the smallest compartment
of the domestic economy.
IV
He continued to tell himself that he was satisfied if his wife was
happy; and it was not till the child's tenth year that he felt a
doubt of her happiness.
Jane had been a preternaturally good child. During the eight years
of her adoption she had caused her foster-parents no anxiety beyond
those connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases. But
her unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she
passed unperturbed through measles, chicken-pox and whooping-cough.
If there was any suffering it was endured vicariously by Mrs.
Lethbury, whose temperature rose and fell with the patient's, and
who could not hear Jane sneeze without visions of a marble angel
weeping over a broken column. But though Jane's prompt recoveries
continued to belie such premonitions, though her existence continued
to move forward on an even keel of good health and good conduct,
Mrs.
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