well-known tunes. Conventional restraint
often, no doubt, produces dwarfed and defective human nature. I
suppose that if souls could be put under a microscope, the undeveloped
rudiments of almost everything would be discovered. It is more
satisfactory to study the things themselves than their suggestions;
this we are usually better able to do among people of simple and
untrammeled modes of life, who are not practiced in disguises. Their
peculiar traits and their general and dominant laws and impulses are
exhibited with less reserve than by those who have learned to be always
on their guard. Of course there are commonplace yeomen as truly as
commonplace aristocrats, and simple life abounds in simpletons.

When a man in Holcroft's position has decided traits, they are apt to
have a somewhat full expression; his rugged nature beside a tamer one
outlines itself more vividly, just as a mountain peak is silhouetted
against the horizon better than a rounded hill. It probably has been
observed that his character possessed much simplicity and directness.
He had neither the force nor the ambition to raise him above his
circumstances; he was merely decided within the lines of his
environment. Perhaps the current of his life was all the stronger for
being narrow. His motives were neither complex nor vacillating. He had
married to keep his home and to continue in the conditions of life dear
from association and the strongest preference, and his heart overflowed
with good will and kindness toward Alida because she promised to solve
the hard problem of the future satisfactorily. Apart from the sympathy
which her misfortune had evoked, he probably could have felt much the
same toward any other good, sensible woman, had she rendered him a
similar service. It is true, now that Alida was in his home, that she
was manifesting agreeable traits which gave him pleasant little
surprises. He had not expected that he would have had half so much to
say to her, yet felt it his duty to be sociable in order to cheer up
and mark the line between even a business marriage and the employment
of a domestic. Both his interest and his duty required that he should
establish the bonds of strong friendly regard on the basis of perfect
equality, and he would have made efforts, similar to those he put
forth, in behalf of any woman, if she had consented to marry him with
Alida's understanding. Now, however, that his suddenly adopted project
of secur