He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women--women especially--in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his.

He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him.

And meanwhile _she_ went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning--for her child and for him.
She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or _menage_ that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or _brusquerie_.
Meanwhile, if she had been _restful_, if he could only have forgotten his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been easily master of his discontents.

For he was naturally of a warm, sensuous temper.

Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have held him.
But she was not restful, she was exacting and self-conscious; and, moreover, a certain new growth of Puritanism in her repelled him.
While he had been passing under the transforming influences of an all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to Evangelical religion for consolation.