that there had been something about Adela that, pet-child of mine as she
was, had troubled me. In all her behaviour, so far as I had had any
opportunity of judging, she had been as good as my desires at least.
But there was a want in her face, a certain flatness of expression which
I did not like. I love the common with all my heart, but I hate the
common-place; and, foolish old bachelor that I am, the common-place in a
woman troubles me, annoys me, makes me miserable. Well, it was something
of the common-place in Adela's expression that had troubled me. Her eyes
were clear, with lovely long dark lashes, but somehow the light in them
had been always the same; and occasionally when I talked to her of the
things I most wished her to care about, there was such an immobile
condition of the features, associated with such a ready assent in words,
that I felt her notion of what I meant must be something very different
indeed from what I did mean. Her face looked as if it were made of
something too thick for the inward light to shine through--wax, and not
living muscle and skin. The fact was, the light within had not been
kindled, else that face of hers would have been ready enough to let it
shine out. Hitherto she had not seemed to me to belong at all to that
company that praises God with sweet looks, as Thomas Hood describes Ruth
as doing. What was wanting I had found it difficult to define. Her soul
was asleep. She was dreaming a child's dreams, instead of seeing a woman's
realities--realities that awake the swift play of feature, as the wind of
God arouses the expression of a still landscape. So there seemed after all
a gulf between her and me. She did not see what I saw, feel what I felt,
seek what I sought. Occasionally even, the delicate young girl, pure and
bright as the snow that hung on the boughs around me, would shock the
wizened old bachelor with her worldliness--a worldliness that lay only in
the use of current worldly phrases of selfish contentment, or selfish
care. Ah! how little do young beauties understand of the pitiful emotions
which they sometimes rouse in the breasts of men whom they suppose to be