ew of the situation, and she
looked at it without flinching and without compromise. Above all, she
had true vision of Stephen Arnold, glorifying nowhere, extenuating
nothing. It was almost cruel to be the victim of such circumstance and
be denied the soft uses of illusion; but if that note of sympathy had
been offered to Hilda she would doubtless have retorted that it was
precisely because she saw him that she loved him. His figure, in its
poverty and austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of
her nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompassing, and her
possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and protecting. I
think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of content with which,
but for Llewellyn and his contract, she would have been willing to go on
indefinitely. It made him hers in a primary and essential way, beside
which any mere acknowledgment or vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the
capital of a pillar firmly rooted. There may be an appearance that she
took a good deal for granted; but if there is, I fear that in the
baldness of this history it has not been evident how much and how
variously Arnold depended on her, in how many places her colour and her
vitality patched out the monkish garment of his soul--this with her
enthusiasm and her cognisance. It may be remembered, too, that there was
in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an
imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.
Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering
doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her
imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a
superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were
facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.

She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under
which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself
answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and
left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would
not find any concessions among its features if she could help it. It was
a trick she played upon her own consciousness; she would not look; but
she could see without looking. She saw that which explained itself to be
best, fittest, most reasonable, and thus she sometimes wandered with
Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when