t the eye grows accustomed to beauty
and ceases to heed it, just as it grows accustomed to, and ceases to
heed, ugliness and deformity, especially where there is no standard, no
measure for it, no comparison with other objects. Just as any
shortcoming, any mental or physical defect that a man hardly notices in
a woman he loves, when alone with her, becomes painfully apparent to him
when he sees her surrounded by others, so does her beauty strike him
when reflected in other eyes, and pass unheeded when seen only by his
own. Katrine was alone, there was no other woman's face to either rival
or be a foil to hers, and after the first six weeks her beauty ceased to
sting and surprise Stephen's senses. She, as it were, became the
standard, since there was no other. And there is no absoluteness about
beauty, nor our admiration for it. When we say we admire a woman because
she is beautiful, we mean we admire her because she is more beautiful
than other women. If all others were the same as she, she would cease to
be called a beautiful woman, and if there were none others than she,
then she would simply be a woman for us. We could not know whether she
was beautiful or not. Man's senses are made not to perceive, but to
compare, and he cannot judge except by comparison. Talbot knew all this,
and he could not help feeling sorry that a girl such as this should be
so isolated with them, and that the man who possessed her should realise
his good fortune so little. He suggested often, for the girl's sake,
excursions down into the town; but Stephen, partly from his religious
views, and more from his anxiety not to waste a minute of his literally
golden time, always frowned down the question, and though the girl
looked at him wistfully she never complained against his decisions. She
seemed to have completely accepted the idea that her marriage meant the
renunciation of all the things she had delighted in, and if her marriage
had given her more of what she had hoped for, she would have been
contented with the change.

One evening, when Stephen was out in the shed at the back of the cabin
stacking up some wood by the light of a candle stuck in a chink of the
logs, Talbot and the girl were sitting idle on each side of the stove,
and somehow, though Talbot seldom opened his lips on such matters,
seldom in his life offered opinion or advice to others, they had now
been speaking of her marriage, and Stephen's attitude towards her.

There were