How simply he had offered all that his art, his tact, his genius had to give!--and how pitifully, how hungrily she had leaned upon it! It had seemed so natural.

Her own mind was clear, her own pulses calm; their friendship had appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much--the hours of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman's sweet and agile wit can build around a man's taxed brain or ruffled nerves.
To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome, her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he had himself trained in her the faculty of response; to rouse in her the gentle, diffident humour which seemed to him a much rarer and more distinguished thing than other women's brilliance; to watch the ways of a personality which appeared to many people a little cold, pale, and over-refined, and was to him supreme distinction; to search for pleasures for her, as a botanist hunts rare flowers; to save her from the most trifling annoyance, if time and brains could do it;--these things, for three years, had made the charm of Welby's life.

And Eugenie knew it--knew it with an affectionate gratitude that had for long seemed both to her and to the world the last word of their situation on both sides--a note, a tone, which could always be evoked from it, touch or strike it where you would.
And now?
Through what subtle phases and developments had time led them to this moment of change and consciousness ?--representing in her, sharp recoil, an instant girding of the will--and in him a new despair, which was also a new docility, a readiness to content and tranquillise her at any cost.

As they stood thus, for these few seconds, amid the shadows of the rich encumbered room, the picture of the weeks and months they had just passed through flashed through both minds--illuminated--thrown into true relation with surrounding and irrevocable fact.

Both trembled--she under the admonition of her own higher life--he, because existence beside her could never again be as sweet to him to-morrow as it had been yesterday.
She moved.