sons may doubtless be described as having stayed
there. His freedom to see--of which the comparisons were part--what
could it do but steadily grow and grow?

It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for ALL freedom--since,
for example, it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs.
Rance's conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the
Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our
circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other
license of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour
as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for
a little, that, though if proposed to--and not only by this aspirant but
by any other--he wouldn't prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none
the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license
in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate,
orientate, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of
the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly
stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from
church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when
it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression--this
was the point--took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press
home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that
is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special
deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could
be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance
struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be
met by one's self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said,
or as good as said, "I'm restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and
also because I'm proud and refined; but if it WASN'T for Mr. Rance and
for my refinement and my pride!"--the possibility of them, I say, turned
to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle
of petticoats, of scented, many-paged letters, of voices as to which,
distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered
little in what part of the resounding country they had learned to make
themselves prevail. The Assinghams and the Miss Lutches had taken the
walk, through the park, to the little old church, "on the property,"
that our friend had often found himself wishing