Only, of an evening, he read the _Times_ for a couple of hours, generally in complete silence, while Elizabeth and Mrs.Gaddesden talked and knitted.
An extraordinary softness--an extraordinary compassion--was steadily invading Elizabeth's mind in regard to him.

Something suggested to her that he had come into life maimed of some essential element of being, possessed by his fellow-men, and that he was now conscious of the lack, as a Greek Faun might be conscious of the difference between his life and that of struggling and suffering men.

Nothing, indeed, could less suggest the blithe nature-life which Greek imagination embodied in the Faun, than the bizarre and restless aspect of the Squire.

This spare white-haired man, with his tempers and irritations, was far indeed from Greek joyousness.

And yet the Greek sense of beauty, half intellectual, half sensuous, had always seemed to her the strongest force in him.