not express--a disposition
which was active in him as other propensities became languid--had
always been in abeyance before Lydia. A severe interpreter might say
that the mere facts of their relation to each other, the melancholy
position of this woman who depended on his will, made a standing
banquet for his delight in dominating. But there was something else
than this in his forbearance toward her: there was the surviving though
metamorphosed effect of the power she had had over him; and it was this
effect, the fitful dull lapse toward solicitations that once had the
zest now missing from life, which had again and again inclined him to
espouse a familiar past rather than rouse himself to the expectation of
novelty. But now novelty had taken hold of him and urged him to make
the most of it.

Mrs. Glasher was seated in the pleasant room where she habitually
passed her mornings with her children round her. It had a square
projecting window and looked on broad gravel and grass, sloping toward
a little brook that entered the pool. The top of a low, black cabinet,
the old oak table, the chairs in tawny leather, were littered with the
children's toys, books and garden garments, at which a maternal lady in
pastel looked down from the walls with smiling indulgence. The children
were all there. The three girls, seated round their mother near the
widow, were miniature portraits of her--dark-eyed, delicate-featured
brunettes with a rich bloom on their cheeks, their little nostrils and
eyebrows singularly finished as if they were tiny women, the eldest
being barely nine. The boy was seated on the carpet at some distance,
bending his blonde head over the animals from a Noah's ark, admonishing
them separately in a voice of threatening command, and occasionally
licking the spotted ones to see if the colors would hold. Josephine,
the eldest, was having her French lesson; and the others, with their
dolls on their laps, sat demurely enough for images of the Madonna.
Mrs. Glasher's toilet had been made very carefully--each day now she
said to herself that Grandcourt might come in. Her head, which, spite
of emaciation, had an ineffaceable beauty in the fine profile, crisp
curves of hair, and clearly-marked eyebrows, rose impressively above
her bronze-colored silk and velvet, and the gold necklace which
Grandcourt had first clasped round her neck years ago. Not that she had
any pleasure in her toilet; her chief thought of herself seen in