aunt--who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated:
perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted
the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during
the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether
it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as
the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter, first
and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all
possible lights. There was something terribly hard to explain in the
fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as
Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to
fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was
particularly so in this one. Just why it was that Roderick should not
logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at
loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated
comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were
as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his
head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping
in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion. That if he
chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick's mistress,
the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case
to which poor Rowland did scanty justice. There were women, he said
to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a
little--women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating. Miss
Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did
so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation,
the divine tremor, of a lover. There were other women--they might have
great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to
be classified as plain--whose triumphs in this line were rare, but
immutably permanent. Such a one preeminently, was Mary Garland. Upon
the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal