her that
cross-examination must necessarily be ironical. She wished to know just
where she was going--what she would gain or lose. This was partly on
account of a native intellectual purity, a temper of mind that had
not lived with its door ajar, as one might say, upon the high-road of
thought, for passing ideas to drop in and out at their pleasure; but had
made much of a few long visits from guests cherished and honored--guests
whose presence was a solemnity. But it was even more because she was
conscious of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her
life not to her own ends, but to those of another, whose life would be
large and brilliant. She had been brought up to think a great deal of
"nature" and nature's innocent laws; but now Rowland had spoken to her
ardently of culture; her strenuous fancy had responded, and she was
pursuing culture into retreats where the need for some intellectual
effort gave a noble severity to her purpose. She wished to be very sure,
to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. There was something
exquisite in this labor of pious self-adornment, and Rowland helped it,
though its fruits were not for him. In spite of her lurking rigidity
and angularity, it was very evident that a nervous, impulsive sense
of beauty was constantly at play in her soul, and that her actual
experience of beautiful things moved her in some very deep places. For
all that she was not demonstrative, that her manner was simple, and her
small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was
a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and
West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling
the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were
shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. "Oh exquisite virtue of
circumstance!" cried Rowland to himself, "that takes us by the hand
and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our attitudes are a
trifle contracted, and beguiles us into testing mistrusted faculties!"
When he said to Mary Garland that he wished he might see her ten years
hence, he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and
to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted;
observation would have but to sow its generous seed. "A superior
woman"--the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging
itself in the vagueness of the future with a kind of hopeless
confidence.