She knew it. That had been her consolation. Arthur was not as the race of dreamers to which he once seemed to have belonged. There was in him a dumb, undying fidelity to the tried and chosen. From the first, before his apathy came on him, he had hardly ever left her to an evening by herself. He had had neither eyes nor ears nor voice for any other woman. And though her face had become the face of another woman, and he hated changes, she knew that it had never changed for him. He loved her more than any of the six children she had borne him.
“After all,” said Aggie, “do you think it really matters?”
“Do I think what matters?”
“What we’ve lost.”
He looked suspiciously at her, his heavy brain stirred by some foreboding of uncomfortable suggestion; she had been thinking of Barbara, perhaps.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He didn’t. The flame in the woman’s heart was not wholly dead, because he had kindled it, and it was one with her love of him. The dream they had dreamed together had lived on for her; first, as an agony, then as a regret. But the man had passed over into the sensual darkness that is seldom pierced by pain. Of the pleasures that had once borne him, buoyant and triumphant, on the crest of the wave, none were left but such sad earthly wreckage as life flings up at the ebbing of the spiritual tide.
They had come to the dark shores, where, if the captain wavers, the ships of dream founder with all their freight.
A dull light was already kindling under his tired eyelids.
“I don’t know what you feel like,” said he, “but I’ve had enough sitting-up for one night. Don’t you think you’d better go to bed?”