Would he be able to insert the point again between those two difficult shells?
Would the Countesses once more be kind to him?
Would drawing-rooms be opened to him, and sometimes opened to him and to no other?
Then he thought of certain special drawing-rooms in which wonderful things had been said to him.

Since that he had been a married man, and those special drawing-rooms and those wonderful words had in no degree actuated him in his choice of a wife.

He had left all those things of his own free will, as though telling himself that there was a better life than they offered to him.

But was he sure that he had found it to be better?
He had certainly sighed for the gauds which he had left.

While his young wife was living he had kept his sighs down, so that she should not hear them; but he had been forced to acknowledge that his new life had been vapid and flavourless.