To be hauled into the police-court, and to be well aware what Dunfield was saying about him, was not exactly an agreeable experience, but it had, like his marriage, an educational value; he knew that the thrashing administered to the groom had been a vicarious one, and this actively awakened sense of a possible inner meaning of things was not without its influence upon him.

It was remarked that he heard the imposition of his fine with a suppressed laugh.

Dunfield, repeating the story with florid circumstance, of course viewed it as an illustration of his debauched state of mind; in reality the laugh came of a perception of the solemn absurdity of the proceedings, and Richard was by so much the nearer to understanding himself and the world.
His wife's death came as an unhoped-for relief; he felt like a man beginning the world anew.

He had no leaning to melancholy, and a prolongation of his domestic troubles would not have made him less hearty in his outward bearing, but the progress of time had developed elements in his nature which were scarcely compatible with a continuance of the life he had been leading.

He had begun to put to himself ominous questions; such, for instance, as--What necessity was he under to maintain the appearance of a cheerful domesticity?
If things got just a trifle more unbearable, why should he not make for himself somewhere else a new home?
He was, it is true, startled at his own audacity, and only some strangely powerful concurrence of motives--such as he was yet to know--could in reality have made him reckless.