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 enthusiasm had vanished, and since no one was to blame, he was beginning to be anxious about its return. At times he suspected that he ought, in some fashion, to assert himself. But, fundamentally humble, as well as proud, he could do nothing more than watch Louise's progress in a sort of despairing approbation, and go on cultivating his own garden.

What changes had taken place in himself, with increasing seriousness of purpose, he could not have said. The changes in Louise were multitudinous, in the sense that a tree in spring is more multitudinous than the same tree in winter. She had acquired foliage and blossoms. He trembled to see what the fruit would be. Once he had been priggish enough to wonder whether he could be contented with a wife brought up in such primitive simplicity; his priggishness received a final snub in Palm Beach, where instead of the impetuous creature whose cultivation he had once bumptiously promised himself to take in hand, he was met by a woman who had herself so completely in hand that she set the tone for everybody within range. Vaguely he suspected that the transformation was the result of a process undertaken with the intention of pleasing him. But to have claimed this would have seemed to him presumptuous. He now found in her a cautiousness, politeness, and undemonstrativeness that, to his dismay, he recognized as an echo of his own; and, their positions reversed, he had some conception of the hurt he must have inflicted on her. Whereupon he