She wished to be very sure,
to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. There was something
exquisite in this labor of pious self-adornment, and Rowland helped it,
though its fruits were not for him. In spite of her lurking rigidity
and angularity, it was very evident that a nervous, impulsive sense
of beauty was constantly at play in her soul, and that her actual
experience of beautiful things moved her in some very deep places. For
all that she was not demonstrative, that her manner was simple, and her
small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was
a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and
West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling
the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were
shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. "Oh exquisite virtue of
circumstance!" cried Rowland to himself, "that takes us by the hand
and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our attitudes are a
trifle contracted, and beguiles us into testing mistrusted faculties!"
When he said to Mary Garland that he wished he might see her ten years
hence, he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and
to the girl herself.
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