. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she
could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden,
the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even
picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author
of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank
from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his
future relations toward a personality so marked, and so important to
every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was
plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or
her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.

But it was when he turned to larger things--to books, movements,
leaders, of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed.
Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established
order in the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was,
would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in
itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though
right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and
an obligation? When his comments on men and things took this tinge,
she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his
venturesome speech and his clergyman's dress.

And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He
was merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation;
whereas she, the child of a mystic--solitary, intense, and deeply
reflective from her earliest Youth--was still thinking and speaking in
the language of her father's generation.

But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these
points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, conscious that here
was the one profound difference between them; it was clear to him
that insensibly she had moved further than she knew from her father's
standpoint. Even among these solitudes, far from men and literature,
she had unconsciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he
penetrated deeper into the nature, he found it honeycombed as it were,
here and there, with beautiful, unexpected softnesses and diffidences.
Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homeward under a cloudy
evening sky, he came upon the great problem of her life--Rose and Rose's
art. He drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill.
She had laid it bare,