She had been also of course far too good for her husband, but he never suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else (keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out.
Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had given it up--dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had replaced.

The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes fill; and he had that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a world without delicacy, had a right to hold up his head.

While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he looked.

It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it to be of her he would think.
He thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live--how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last.

They had looks that survived--had them as great poets had quoted lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.