nt to a master than the intimate aspect of a primitive racial
attitude toward life.

At the end of the hall, beyond the open door of the bedroom (which he
still occupied with his wife from an ineradicable conviction that all
respectable married persons slept together no matter how uncomfortable
they might be), Cyrus discerned the untidy figure of Mrs. Treadwell
reflected in a mirror before which she stood brushing her back hair
straight up from her neck to a small round knot on the top of her head.
She was a slender, flat-chested woman, whose clothes, following some
natural bent of mind, appeared never to be put on quite straight or
properly hooked and buttoned. It was as if she perpetually dressed in a
panic, forgetting to fasten her placket, to put on her collar or to mend
the frayed edges of her skirt. When she went out, she still made some
spasmodic attempts at neatness; but Susan's untiring efforts and
remonstrances had never convinced her that it mattered how one looked in
the house--except indeed when a formal caller arrived, for whom she
hastily tied a scarf at the neck of her dirty basque and flung a purple
wool shawl over her shoulders. Her spirit had been too long broken for
her to rebel consciously against her daughter's authority; but her mind
was so constituted that the sense of order was missing, and the pretty
coquetry of youth, which had masqueraded once as the more enduring
quality of self-respect, was extinguished in the five and thirty
penitential years of her marriage. She had a small vacant face, where
the pink and white had run into muddiness, a mouth that sagged at the
corners like the mouth of a frightened child, and eyes of a sickly
purple, which had been compared by Cyrus to "sweet violets," in the only
compliment he ever paid her. Thirty-five years ago, in one of those
attacks of indiscretion which overtake the most careful man in the
spring, Cyrus had proposed to her; and when she declined him, he had
immediately repeated his offer, animated less by any active desire to
possess her, than by the dogged male determination to over-ride all
obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda
Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the
instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop
that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which
people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it
as it has in the purs