have felt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her
change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to
mediocrity. He could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses;
for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; for anything but her
acquiescence and her tact. She reminded him of a juggler tossing
knives; but the knives were blunt and she knew they would never cut
her.

And then, gradually, habit formed a protecting surface for his
sensibilities. If he paid for each day's comfort with the small
change of his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and
set less store upon the coin. He had drifted into a dulling
propinquity with Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap
revenge of satirizing the situation. He even began to reckon up the
advantages which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not
better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy
than a whole one who had lacked opportunity to acquire the art. For
it _was_ an art, and made up, like all others, of concessions,
eliminations and embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and
shadows skillfully softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage the
lights, and he knew exactly to what training she owed her skill. He
even tried to trace the source of his obligations, to discriminate
between the influences which had combined to produce his domestic
happiness: he perceived that Haskett's commonness had made Alice
worship good breeding, while Varick's liberal construction of the
marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues; so that
he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion which
made his life easy if not inspiring.

From this phase he passed into that of complete acceptance. He