It
appeared that Stillman had been something of an aimless wanderer for
many years, and as he talked on and on, giving detached glimpses of the
remote places he had visited, Claire had a curious sense of futility.
She read between his clipped and vivid sentences the tragedy of a
personality worsted by the soft hands of circumstances. This man might
have done things. As it was he was an idler. He gave her the impression
of a man waiting vaguely for opportunity--like some traveler pacing
restlessly up and down a railway station platform in expectation of the
momentary arrival of a delayed train. She tried to imagine him as she
felt sure he must once have been--youthful, eager, ardent, a man of
charming enthusiasms that just missed being extravagances, who could
bring zest to his virtues as well as to his follies.
"Surely," she thought, "something more than inclination must have pushed
him into this deadly stagnation."
And at once Miss Munch's insinuating question leaped up to answer:
"You know about his wife, of course!"
Were men put out of countenance by such impersonal tricks of fortune?
Impersonal?... this domestic tragedy?... Yes, Claire felt that it must
be, otherwise the man tramping at her side would have wrestled so
passionately against fate as to have come away at least spattered with
the mud of defeat. No, Stillman was not defeated, he was merely
arrested, restrained, held for orders.
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