That she was a very different woman from Christina Light did not at all
prove that she was less a woman, and if the Princess Casamassima had
gone up into a high place to publish her disrelish of a man who lacked
the virile will, it was very certain that Mary Garland was not a person
to put up, at any point, with what might be called the princess's
leavings. It was Christina's constant practice to remind you of the
complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her
troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights. Mary
Garland had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory
that she had really a more multitudinous sense of human things, a more
delicate imagination, and a finer instinct of character. She did you the
honors of her mind with a grace far less regal, but was not that faculty
of quite as remarkable an adjustment? If in poor Christina's strangely
commingled nature there was circle within circle, and depth beneath
depth, it was to be believed that Mary Garland, though she did not amuse
herself with dropping stones into her soul, and waiting to hear them
fall, laid quite as many sources of spiritual life under contribution.
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