infinitely worse--she made him feel his inferiority. The sense of
mental equality had been gratifying to his raw ambition; but as
his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of her also
increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by
no such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up
is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more
Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the
obverse of beauty. To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and
while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her
incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of
any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate
their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never
seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as
though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious
enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations
of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well
intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs.
Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow
never seemed to be incorporated with the text.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her
hair. The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left
Glennard's imagination untouched, or had at most the negative
effect of removing her still farther from the circle of his
contracting sympathies. We are all the sport of time; and fate
had so perversely ordered the chronology of Margaret Aubyn's
romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as though he had
lost a friend.