egan to define themselves more sharply.
In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest memories was the memory of
their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert's anxiety to
make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the
modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what
was aesthetically correct. But during their furnishing days he was never
tired of wandering about in search of pretty things--a rug, a screen, an
engraving--which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to
live. He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness,
and then Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely.
She would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had
gone, she would move slowly to the window and look out at the great mass
of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden,
with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the
wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common.
Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless
wealth--how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor,
its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the
countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents
of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the
child.
But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral
state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and
hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of the
senses now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the
presence of the profound spiritual difference circumstance had developed
between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her
religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity,
failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed
to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make
something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to
have been alive with conflict--_All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone
over me!_
Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften
such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work
among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the
great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning
and regret, b
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