He had taken this one more beautiful thing as it came, without reflection, without thought, enjoying it day by day.
He had got into the way of taking things like this. Ten years ago, at the age of twenty-five, he had married a Polish lady, and had brought her soon afterwards, a confirmed invalid, to a villa on the Italian Riviera. They had never again moved far from it, it was too much trouble. His wife was always ill, she had her writing, her friends, her flowers. As for himself, he drifted along in an existence pleasant enough, which slowly and surely sapped his energy, and left him a sense of waste and of weariness that did not diminish with the passing years.
He had no particular ties with England. His father, a man of some position in his county, died from a fall out hunting when Giles was only four years old. The death of his mother, a very beautiful and good woman, came just as he was leaving Eton, and left a big mark upon his mind, strengthening the silent reserve of his nature; and yet even with her, to whom he had been devoted, he had never spoken of things which affected him deeply; it seemed as if the power of a complete trustfulness were hidden from him, and reserved for something fuller and more intimate to reveal.
At Oxford he made many friends, he was silently sympathetic to them, but when they came to sum him up, they were forced to confess that they did not know him, even in that ordinary degree in which youths know each other; they liked him, but they did not know him.
When he left Oxford, he was in the position of a man with no decided leanings or dislikes in regard to a profession, with more than sufficient means, and with a nature which required the spur of necessity or of some vital interest to force it to exertion. He spent some years in travelling, generally with sport as an object; and then came his marriage. He had never been quite able afterwards to understand how it had come about; it had been a matter of friendship, of sentiment, of compassion; but there it had been for ten years an accomplished fact, bringing with it a life from which all purpose seemed to be barred.
He had pursuits; for instance, he occasionally went over to Monte Carlo and gambled mildly, he made annual shooting trips to Algeria or Morocco, and he was continually yachting round the coast; but of work, nothing; of love—nothing!
There had never been anything really in common between him and his wife. Certainly, he was always gentle and courteous to her, but there was in her a vein of spirituelle, expansive espiéglerie, which was somehow beyond him; it did not hit with the grey and reserved temper of his mind, with his deeply-rooted indolence.
A man of refinement, of no vulgar instincts, of certainly the greater logical reasoning power, he had yet always found himself un peu bête in her presence, just a little commonplace—it was irritating.
He admitted to himself indeed, almost from the first, that his marriage had been a mistake, but he did not cease to have a great admiration for his wife’s personality, for her courage and patience under suffering, for her wide sympathies, and the wit and charm of her manner. He regarded her with the eye of a stranger as a very desirable and delightful woman; he knew her to be the wrong one for himself.
He saw her side of the question also—it was a habit of his to see the other side—and he pitied her.