ss Garland's sake; and if it had sown the seeds of
reconciliation, he wished to close his eyes to it for his own--for the
sake of that unshaped idea, forever dismissed and yet forever present,
which hovered in the background of his consciousness, with a hanging
head, as it were, and yet an unshamed glance, and whose lightest motions
were an effectual bribe to patience. Was the engagement broken? Rowland
wondered, yet without asking. But it hardly mattered, for if, as was
more than probable, Miss Garland had peremptorily released her cousin,
her own heart had by no means recovered its liberty. It was very certain
to Rowland's mind that if she had given him up she had by no means
ceased to care for him passionately, and that, to exhaust her charity
for his weaknesses, Roderick would have, as the phrase is, a long row to
hoe. She spoke of Roderick as she might have done of a person suffering
from a serious malady which demanded much tenderness; but if Rowland
had found it possible to accuse her of dishonesty he would have said now
that she believed appreciably less than she pretended to in her victim's
being an involuntary patient. There are women whose love is care-taking
and patronizing, and who rather prefer a weak man because he gives them
a comfortable sense of strength. It did not in the least please Rowland
to believe that Mary Garland was one of these; for he held that such
women were only males in petticoats, and he was convinced that Miss
Garland's heart was constructed after the most perfect feminine model.
That she was a very different woman from Christina Light did not at all
prove that she was less a woman, and if the Princess Casamassima had
gone up into a high place to publish her disrelish of a man who lacked
the virile will, it was very certain that Mary Garland was not a person
to put up, at any point, with what might be called the princess's
leavings. It was Christina's constant practice to remind you of the
complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her
troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights. Mary
Garland had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory
that she had really a more multitudinous sense of human things, a more
delicate imagination, and a finer instinct of character. She did you the
honors of her mind with a grace far less regal, but was not that faculty
of quite as remarkable an adjustment? If in poor Christina's strangely
commingle