Spring had been dull and unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.
He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.
The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic sense.

Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them--admiring the rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers, the books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling would sweep over him: "By George, do I really own all this, when my ideal is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese' ?" True, he was not to blame for the niceness of his things--Flora did it; but still--there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean.
It might, of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for collecting, it was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost no little money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and--as everybody knows--what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it be a coronet or a cruet-stand.
To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would not have one's wife otherwise.

She might, for instance, have been like Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife, Kirsteen, whose career was revolution.

No--a wife who had two, and only two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was never out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play, could cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good, verse tolerable, and--above all--who wished for no better fate than Fate had given her--was a wife not to be sneezed at.

And Felix never had.