for in that earnest period the minds, as well as the emotions, of lovers were orderly. it was an age when eager young men flocked to church on sunday morning, and eloquent divines discoursed upon the victorian poets in the middle of the week. he could afford to smile now when he recalled the solemn browning class in which he had first lost his heart. how passionately he had admired victoria`s virginal features! how fervently he had envied her competent but caressing way with the poet! incredible as it seemed to him now, he had fallen in love with her while she recited from the more ponderous passages in the ring and the book.
he had fallen in love with her then, though he had never really enjoyed browning, and it had been a relief to him when the unseen, in company with its illustrious poet, had at last gone out of fashion. yet, since he was disposed to admire all the qualities he did not possess, he had never ceased to respect the firmness with which victoria continued to deal in other forms with the absolute. as the placid years passed, and she came to rely less upon her virginal features, it seemed to him that the ripe opinions of her youth began to shrink and flatten as fruit does that has hung too long on the tree.
she had never changed, he realized, since he had first known her; she had become merely riper, softer, and sweeter in nature. her advantage rested where advantage never fails to rest, in moral fervour. to be invariably right was her single wifely failing. for his wife, he sighed, with the vague unrest of a husband whose infidelities are imaginary, was a genuinely good woman. she was as far removed from pretence as she was from the posturing virtues that flourish in the credulous world of the drama.
the pity of it was that even the least exacting husband should so often desire something more piquant than goodness.