She feared that fiery persuasive
quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With
him conviction was life--it was the man himself, to an extraordinary
degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those now ardors with
which his mind was filling--she who loved him!--except by building,
at any rate for the time, an inclosure of silence round her Christian
beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation
between Robert and the Squire in the early days of their friendship,
but in Catherine's mind there was no trembling presence of new knowledge
conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of
her life, she was more passionately convinced than ever that the only
knowledge truly worth having in this world was: the knowledge of God's
mercies in Christ.

So, gradually, with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of
herself from Robert's ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything
that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical
books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone--always
for him, of him--but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however,
that so great a change in their life could be effected without a
perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds
and griefs on both sides. There came a moment, when, as he sat alone one
evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke
to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their
relation to each other was altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the
terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery,
'sailing the seas where there was never sand'--the vast shadowy seas of
speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had
been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who
throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who
suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them.
And now, at every turn in their talk, their reading, in many of the
smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the
presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of
self-defence on her side, of pained drawing back on his. And with every
succeeding effort of his at self-repression, it seemed to him as though
fresh nails were driven into