which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that
it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the
whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate. "And they're
irreconcilable!" he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house,
but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me:
"If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should
know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a
hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine
kinds. Oh the shams--those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked
up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and
I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but
that I should never have expected to find them there. "Ah it doesn't
matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to
hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful;
strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself
and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by
his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the
importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I
must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I
watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of
which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united
revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem
to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre
fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it
was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her
tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in
themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a
woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at