He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied her--sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncomplex books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience, while he admired, with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, all the wrong pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly book,--watered Dumas, as a rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot--the hall and dining-room bristled with trophies, one walked over them everywhere--and she looked at pictures of them in the books of travel he eagerly put before her; but it was as pictures that they interested her, remotely, not as animals suitable for shooting.
Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a very gracefully affectionate husband; his manners were as charming as his mind was blundering; but with this chill young nymph any attempt at marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and grotesque. With Milly, he soon felt it, the barrier between their minds was inevitably a barrier shutting him out from even these manifestations of tenderness. He was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he were not to withdraw the distaste would become more than negative. He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a failure and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not dislike him at all--at a distance; and, very gaily, with a debonair manner of perfect trust, he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, and it was rarely that he required her to pour out his tea for him.
Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit to Chawlton House, the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked forward to meeting her friend's inappropriate husband almost with trembling. She felt that she might be called to the great and happy mission of reconciliation, that Milly might have been mistaken and Dick undervalued. Milly's trust in her and dependence upon her had grown with leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with tact and time she might do much to rebuild the broken life, if there were materials with which to build it. The first glance at Dick showed her the futility of such hopes. He was a dear; that at once was obvious to her; and he was delightful looking; his small head well set on broad shoulders, his short nose expressive of courage and character; his grey eyes as free from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection. But he was a boy, a kind, good boy, an ingenuous, well-mannered materialist, living, as it were, by automatic functions, and as incapable of spiritual initiative as he was of evil. What ground of meeting could there be between him and her Milly, compact as she was of subtleties, profundities and possibilities? No; Dick offered no materials for the building of a shrine, and unless marriage was a shrine Christina could not contemplate it. There had been a deep instinct, like one of nature's cruel yet righteous laws, in Milly's withdrawal; to have consented, to have compromised, would have been to stifle and stultify herself.