He had no interior qualities in harmony with her own.

An intensely selfish man, it was impossible for him to inspire a feeling of love in a mind so pure in its impulses, and so acute in its perceptions.

If Mrs.Dexter had been a worldly-minded woman--a lover of--or one moved by the small ambitions of fashionable life--her husband would have been all well enough.

She would have been adjoined to him in a way altogether satisfactory to her tastes, and they would have circled their orbit of life without an eccentric motion.

But the deeper capacities and higher needs of Mrs.Dexter, made this union quite another thing.
Her husband had no power to fill her soul--to quicken her life-pulses--to stir the silent chords of her heart with the deep, pure, ravishing melodies they were made to give forth.