He was intellectual , but not actively so ; his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no purpose or had not vigor to attain it ; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words . Imagination , in the proper meaning of the term , made no part of Wakefield 's gifts . With a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart , and a mind never feverish with riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality , who could have anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric deeds ? Had his acquaintances been asked who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be remembered on the morrow , they would have thought of Wakefield . Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated . She , without having analyzed his character , was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind ; of a peculiar sort of vanity , the most uneasy attribute about him ; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets hardly worth revealing ; and , lastly , of what she called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man . This latter quality is indefinable , and perhaps non-existent . Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife . It is the dusk of an October evening . His equipment is a drab greatcoat , a hat covered with an oil-cloth , top-boots , an umbrella in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other . He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he is to take the night-coach into the country . She would fain inquire the length of his journey , its object and the probable time of his return , but , indulgent to his harmless love of mystery , interrogates him only by a look . He tells her not to expect him positively by the return-coach nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days , but , at all events , to look for him at supper on Friday evening . Wakefield , himself , be it considered , has no suspicion of what is before him . He holds out his hand ; she gives her own and meets his parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years ' matrimony , and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield , almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week 's absence . After the door has closed behind him , she perceives it thrust partly open and a vision of her husband 's face through the aperture , smiling on her and gone in a moment . For the time this little incident is dismissed without a thought , but long afterward , when she has been more years a widow than a wife , that smile recurs and flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield 's visage . In her many musings she surrounds the original smile with a multitude of fantasies which make it strange and awful ; as , for instance , if she imagines him in a coffin , that parting look is frozen on his pale features ; or if she dreams of him in heaven , still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile . Yet for its sake , when all others have given him up for dead , she sometimes doubts whether she is a widow . But our business is with the husband .
We must hurry after him along the street ere he lose his individuality and melt XXXXX the great mass of London life .
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