ion in
after years did Sylvia Moorhouse express so favourable an opinion of
her. In all things she affected singularity; especially it was her
delight to utter democratic and revolutionary sentiments among hearers
who, belonging to a rigidly conservative order, held such opinions
impious. Arrived at womanhood, she affected scorn of the beliefs and
habits cherished by her own sex, and shrank from association with the
other. Godwin Peak was the first man with whom she conversed in the
tone of friendship, and it took a year or more before that point was
reached. As her intimacy with him established itself, she was observed
to undergo changes which seemed very significant in the eyes of her few
acquaintances. Disregard of costume had been one of her
characteristics, but now she moved gradually towards the opposite
extreme, till her dresses were occasionally more noticeable for
richness than for good taste.

Christian, for kindred reasons, was equally debarred from the pleasures
and profits of society. At school, his teachers considered him clever,
his fellows for the most part looked down upon him as a sentimental
weakling. The death of his parents, when he was still a lad, left him
to the indifferent care of a guardian nothing akin to him. He began
life in an uncongenial position, and had not courage to oppose the
drift of circumstances. The romantic attachment which absorbed his best
years naturally had a debilitating effect, for love was never yet a
supporter of the strenuous virtues, save when it has survived fruition
and been blessed by reason. In most men a fit of amorous mooning works
its own cure; energetic rebound is soon inevitable. But Christian was
so constituted that a decade of years could not exhaust his capacity
for sentimental languishment. He made it a point of honour to seek no
female companionship which could imperil his faith. Unfortunately, this
avoidance of the society which would soon have made him a happy
renegade, was but too easy. Marcella and he practically encouraged each
other in a life of isolation, though to both of them such an existence
was anything but congenial. Their difficulties were of the same nature
as those which had always beset Godwin Peak; they had no relatives with
whom they cared to associate, and none of the domestic friends who, in
the progress of time, establish and extend a sphere of genuine intimacy.

Most people who are capable of independent thought rapidly outgrow the