ns and sympathies, for there were times when she lavished
them on him; and that she could seem without them was another proof of
that depth of nature which he liked to imagine had first attracted him
to her. Dan Mavering had never been able to snub any one in his life;
it gave him a great respect for Alice that it seemed not to cost her an
effort or a regret, and it charmed him to think that her severity was
part of the unconscious sham which imposed her upon the world for a
person of inflexible design and invariable constancy to it. He was not
long in seeing that she shared this illusion, if it was an illusion, and
that perhaps the only person besides himself who was in the joke was
her mother. Mrs. Pasmer and he grew more and more into each other's
confidence in talking Alice over, and he admired the intrepidity of this
lady, who was not afraid of her daughter even in the girl's most topping
moments of self-abasement. For his own part, these moods of hers never
failed to cause him confusion and anxiety. They commonly intimated
themselves parenthetically in the midst of some blissful talk they were
having, and overcast his clear sky with retrospective ideals of conduct
or presentimental plans for contingencies that might never occur. He
found himself suddenly under condemnation for not having reproved her at
a given time when she forced him to admit she had seemed unkind or cold
to others; she made him promise that even at the risk of alienating her
affections he would make up for her deficiencies of behaviour in such
matters whenever he noticed them. She now praised him for what he had
done for Mrs. Frobisher and her sister at Mrs. Bellingham's reception;
she said it was generous, heroic. But Mavering rested satisfied with his
achievement in that instance, and did not attempt anything else of the
kind. He did not reason from cause to effect in regard to it: a man's
love is such that while it lasts he cannot project its object far enough
from him to judge it reasonable or unreasonable; but Dan's instincts
had been disciplined and his perceptions sharpened by that experience.
Besides, in bidding him take this impartial and even admonitory course
toward her, she stipulated that they should maintain to the world a
perfect harmony of conduct which should be an outward image of the
union of their lives. She said that anything less than a continued
self-sacrifice of one to the other was not worthy of the name of love,
and that