She had believed Roderick was a fine fellow when she bade him farewell
beneath the Northampton elms, and this belief, to her young, strenuous,
concentrated imagination, had meant many things. If it was to grow cold,
it would be because disenchantment had become total and won the battle
at each successive point.
Miss Garland had even in her face and carriage something of the
preoccupied and wearied look of a person who is watching at a sick-bed;
Roderick's broken fortunes, his dead ambitions, were a cruel burden to
the heart of a girl who had believed that he possessed "genius," and
supposed that genius was to one's spiritual economy what full pockets
were to one's domestic. And yet, with her, Rowland never felt, as
with Mrs. Hudson, that undercurrent of reproach and bitterness toward
himself, that impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of
happiness. Was this justice, in Miss Garland, or was it mercy? The
answer would have been difficult, for she had almost let Rowland feel
before leaving Rome that she liked him well enough to forgive him an
injury. It was partly, Rowland fancied, that there were occasional
lapses, deep and sweet, in her sense of injury.
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