led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a
living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was
nobody to feel him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.

So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If
it had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.

But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything
like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial,
that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him
incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further
sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an
exacting deity could require no more of him.

And it wasn't the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first
woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects. Looking back
he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish, by
the folly or incompetence of his womankind.

Strictly speaking, it was his first wife, Mary Gwendolen, the one
the children called Mother, who had begun it. She had made his first
parish unendurable to him by dying in it. This she had done when Alice
was born, thereby making Alice unendurable to him, too. Poor Mamie! He
always thought of her as having, inscrutably, failed him.

All three of them had failed him.

His second wife, Frances, the one the children called Mamma (the