, 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 country-woman
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, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their
standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from
what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely
curious and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her
intellectual limitations,