unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered
torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.

He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.

The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them--admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers,
the books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: "By George, do I really own all this, when my
ideal is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?"
True, he was not to blame for the niceness of his things--Flora did it;
but still--there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean.
It might, of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for
collecting, it was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost
no little money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and--as
everybody knows--what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it
be a coronet or a cruet-stand.

To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would
not have one's wife otherwise. She might, for instance, have been like
Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's
wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife,
Kirsteen, whose career was revolution. No--a wife who had two, and only
two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was never
out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play,
could cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good,
verse tolerable, and--above all--who wished for no better fate than Fate