fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that he might not
have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of joy that was
almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs. Bentley openly
approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not have quite
abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible for us, and
it must have been such a load off him when she took that turn with us.

She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the
same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That
is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been
on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in
her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first
meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of
feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we
made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his
indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his
wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it
him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which
almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was
with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so
perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like
that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she
liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty
to seem to like us a great deal more.

She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her
from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned
incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn
into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning's
apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had