He realised, too, at the same sharp moment the conflict in which he was engaged.On the one side was all his life, his sloth and ease and comfort, his religion, his good name, his easy intercourse with his fellow-men, Grace, intellectual laziness, acceptance of things as they most easily are, Skeaton, regular meals, good drainage, moral, physical and spiritual, a good funeral and a favourable obituary in The Skeaton Times.On the other hand unrest, ill-health, separation from Grace, an elusive and never-to-be-satisfied pursuit, scandal and possible loss of religion, unhappiness...At least it was to his credit that he realised the conflict; it is even further to his credit that he grasped and admitted the hopelessness of it.
He knew which way he would go; even now he was tired with the thought of the struggle; he sank into his shabby chair with a sigh of weariness; his hand stretched out instinctively for an easy volume.But oh, Maggie! how strange and fascinating at that moment she appeared to him, with her odd silences, her flashes of startled surprise, her sense of being half the day in another world, her kindness to him and then her sudden terror of him, her ignorance and then the conviction that she gave suddenly to him that she knew more than he would ever know, above all, the way that some dark spirit deep down in him supported her wild rebellions, her irreverences, her irreligion, her scorn of tradition.Oh! she was a witch! Grace's word for her was right, but not Grace's sense of it.The more Grace was shocked the more tempting to him the witch became.It had seemed to him, that day in Katherine's drawing-room, so slight a thing when she had said that she did not love him, he had no doubt but that he could change that.How could a child, so raw and ignorant, resist such a man? And yet she had resisted.That resistance had been at the root of the trouble.Whichever way things went now, he was a defeated man.
The door opened and Grace came in.Looking at her he realised that she would never understand the struggle through which he had been timorously wading, and saw that she was further away from him than she had ever been before.He blamed her too.She had had no right to refuse that man to Maggie.Had she allowed Maggie to see him none of this might have occurred.The man was a forger and would, had he lived, have gone to prison, but there would not then have been the same open scandal.No, he blamed Grace.It might be that their old absolutely confident intimacy would never be renewed.He felt cold and lonely.He bent forward, putting some coal on the fire, breaking it up into a cheerful blaze.Then he looked up at her, and his heart was touched.She looked to-day an old woman.Her hair was untidy and her face was dull grey in colour.Her eyes moved restlessly round the room, wandering from picture to picture, from the mantelpiece to the chairs, from the chairs to the book-shelves, as though she sought in the sight of these well-remembered things some defence and security.