But Dorothy, neither easily moved to wrath, nor yet given to the
nourishing of active resentment, was not therefore at all the
readier to forget the results of moral difference, or to permit any
nearer approach on the part of one such as her cousin had shown
himself. As long as he continued so self-serene and unashamed, what
satisfaction to her or what good to him could there be in it, even
were he to content himself with the cousinly friendship which, as
soon as he was capable of it, she was willing to afford him? As it
was now, she granted him only distant recognition in company,
neither seeking nor avoiding him; and as to all opportunity of
private speech, entirely shunning him. For some time, in the vanity
of his experience, he never doubted that these were only feminine
arts, or that when she judged him sufficiently punished, she would
relax the severity of her behaviour and begin to make him amends.
But this demeanour of hers endured so long, and continued so
uniform, that at length he began to doubt the universality of his
experience, and to dread lest the maiden should actually prove what
he had never found maiden before, inexorable. He did not reflect
that he had given her no ground whatever for altering her judgment
or feeling with regard to him. But in truth her thoughts rarely
turned to him at all, and while his were haunting her as one who was
taking pleasure in the idea that she was making him feel her
resentment, she was simply forgetting him, busy perhaps with some
self-offered question that demanded an answer, or perhaps brooding a
little over the past, in which the form of Richard now came and went
at its will.

So long as Rowland imagined the existence of a quarrel, he imagined
therein a bond between them; when he became convinced that no