And it was because the war had interfered with this pleasant and perpetual challenge to the senses of the outer world, because it forced a man back on general ideas that he did not want to consider--God, Country, Citizenship--that the Squire had hated the war.
But this woman who had become an inmate of his house, while she ministered to all the tastes that the Squire had built up as a screen between himself and either the tragic facts of contemporary life, or any troublesome philosophizing about them, was yet gradually, imperceptibly, drawing the screen aside.

Her humanity was developing the feeble shoots of sympathy and conscience in himself.
What she felt, he was beginning to feel; and when she hated anything he must at least uncomfortably consider why.
But all this she did and achieved through her mere fitness and delightfulness as a companion.

He had never imagined that life would bring him anybody--least of all a woman--who would both give him so much, and save him so much.

Selfish, exacting, irritable--he knew very well that he was all three.

But it had not prevented this capable, kind, clever creature from devoting herself to him, from doing her utmost, not only to save his estate and his income, but to make his life once more agreeable to him, in spite of the war and all the rancour and resentments it had stirred up in him.
How patient she had been with these last! He was actually beginning to be ashamed of some of them.