She had never given him any grounds for expecting that she might some day marry him, yet he evidently found it impossible to marry anybody else.

This was the touching fact about Franklin, the one bright point, as it were, in his singularly colourless personality.

His fidelity was like a fleck of orange on the wing of some grey, unobtrusive moth; it made him visible.
Althea's compassionate friendship seemed to sustain him sufficiently on his way; he did not pine or protest, though he punctually requested.

He frequently appeared and he indefatigably wrote, and his long constancy, the unemotional trust and closeness of their intimacy, made him seem less a lover than the American husband of tradition, devoted and uncomplaining, who had given up hoping that his wife would ever come home and live with him.
Althea rather resented this aspect of their relation; she was well aware of its comicality; but though Franklin's devotion was at times something of a burden, though she could expect from him none of the glamour of courtship, she could ill have dispensed with his absorption in her.
Franklin's absorption in her was part of her own personality; she would hardly have known herself without it; and her relation to him, irksome, even absurd as she sometimes found it, was perhaps the one thing in her life that most nearly linked her to reality; it was a mirage, at all events, of the responsible affections that her life lacked.
And now, in her mood of positive morbidity, the sight of Franklin's handwriting on the thick envelope brought her the keenest sense she had ever had of his value.

One might have no aim oneself, yet to be some one else's aim saved one from that engulfing consciousness of nonentity; one might be uncertain and indefinite, but a devotion like Franklin's really defined one.