Phyllis knew much more what laid beneath than he. To her the yearning, troubled, inarticulate soul of the man appealed as pathetically as the sight of some great, ashamed, bearded fellow who had never been taught to read. In the finer sense Adair had never been taught anything. His instincts alone had saved him from being a clod. In his fight up from the bottom he had arrived a good deal splashed with mud; and Phyllis, figuratively speaking, rolled back her sleeves, and set herself to tubbing him.
He was extraordinarily submissive in this respect, extraordinarily grateful and responsive. He made no pretense of hiding his ignorance, but questioned her like a child, and often as artlessly. At thirty-four he was having the universe reconstructed for him, and the process filled him with astonishment. Phyllis read aloud to him from such unheard-of authors as Thackeray, Carlyle, Hardy, Stevenson, and Meredith until these strange names became quite familiar. She could read French, too, translating as she went, while he sat back, profoundly respectful and impressed, his humility tinged with the zest of ownership. Yes, her youth, her beauty, her intelligence, her love, all were his; and as he gazed at her through the haze of his cigar, the words often fell heedlessly on his ear as he felt the mantling of a divine contentment.
Yet he could be very masterful on some matters. Phyllis was not allowed to receive the advances of the company, or to associate with any of its members, a prohibition not a little difficult to obey in the course of their constant traveling together. But if Phyllis shrank from being rude, Adair suffered from no similar delicacy, and was brutally direct in making his wishes plain to his stage companions. It was not only that he feared Lydia de Vere, whose yellowish eyes were full of enmity, and whose powers for mischief he well knew; but in contrast to his dainty wife these theater-people somehow began to strike him as tarnished and common, and he was jealously reluctant to expose her to their familiarities. Intercourse with Phyllis was sharpening his critical faculty; his view-point was insensibly changing; there were even times when he realized his own deficiencies.--Tommy Merguelis was the one exception he made. The lanky young man, when weighed in the new scales, was found to be less wanting than the others. There was something sensitive and refined about Tommy. Ill-health, pins, and years of furniture-polish had been as cleansing fires. He was a humble person who would accept his humble inch and grin gratefully, and not reach out for an ell. Yes, Phyllis might be friends with Tommy.