It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions. It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere. They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower. And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated in all sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his eyes, "I am _so_ glad you like it, dear Owen."
Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers, who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure and his breakfast historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and duchesses who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old town, and Owen had found himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing, cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of Gwendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished. Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for Gwendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion--the same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognised a difference. He wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Gwendolen a dwelling tenderness, a brooding touch, indeed, of reminiscent wistfulness. Was it to show an unbecoming complacency if he allowed his mind to dwell upon the possibilities that this development in Gwendolen presented to his imagination? He was delicate and poor and, despite a large visiting-list, he was lonely. He was fond of Gwendolen and of her two nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, as she had always amused him; for though her drawing-room had become interesting, though she had developed a sense of humour, or at least the intention of humorousness, though she often attempted playfulness and even irony, she was still at heart as disproportionately earnest as she had been in youth. But Gwendolen would make no romantic demands upon him, and she would not expect him to take even red lacquer as seriously as she did, or to follow with the same breathlessness the erratic movements of modern æstheticism. She was accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness, and would resent it no more in the husband than in the friend. Altogether, as he sat there writing at Gwendolen's lovely bureau, he knew that a sense of homely magic grew upon him.
