could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and
cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare
social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by
conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother
as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it
was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might
sometimes openly rebel against her mother's domination, as my wife and I
had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately
submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different
sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her
in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice
where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her
more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of
man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have
given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and
joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and
sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific
pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any
effort to mask.

When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn
in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He
asked me questions--whether I had noticed this thing or that about her,
or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to
compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had
undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.


XIII.