What was left then? An invalid and
the wife of an invalid, coddlings, cossetings, devotion, ambition far
away, life kept in him by loving heart and loving hands. Hers must be the
heart and the hands. Hers also were the keen eyes that knew every
weakness, every baseness, of the man to whom heart and hands must
minister, but would see no more the battle and the triumph and the
brilliance which set them sparkling and seemed to make the world alight
for them.
For a little while the third thing, the remaining possibility, was
unformulated in her thoughts; perhaps she had a scruple which made her
turn away from it. But her speculations would not be denied their
irresponsible freedom of ranging over all the field of chance. If it were
true, if more than it, more than the kind timid woman had dared to say,
were true, he might die. He might die, not in some dim far-off time when
nature made the thing seem inevitable, when he had lived his life, been
Prime Minister and so forth, and she had lived hers, filling it with work
for him, and with looking on at him and with endurance of him, but
sooner, much sooner, almost now, when he had not lived his life, while
hers was not exhausted, when there would still be left to her another of
her own to live after he was gone.
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