She wished sincerely that Francis would not come
back; she wished that, riding one day, she might find Sales Hall
blotted out, leaving no sign, no trace, nothing but earth and fresh
spikes of green.
Day by day she watched the advance of spring. The larches put out
their little tassels, celandines opened their yellow eyes, the smell
of the gorse was her youth wafted back to her and she shook her head
and said she did not want it. This maturity was better: she had
reached the age when she could almost dissociate things from herself
and she found them better and more beautiful. She needed this
consolation, for it seemed that her personal relationships were to be
few and shadowy; conscious in herself of a capacity for crystallizing
them enduringly, they yet managed to evade her; it was some fault,
some failure in herself, but not knowing the cause she could not cure
it and she accepted it with the apparent impassivity which was,
perhaps, the origin of the difficulty.
And capable as she was of love, she was incapable of struggling for
it. She wanted Henrietta's affection; she wanted to give every
happiness to that girl, but she could not be different from herself,
she could not bait the trap. And it seemed that Henrietta might be
finding happiness without her help, or at least without realizing that
it was she who had given Charles his chance. She had rejected her plan
of taking Henrietta away: it was better to leave her in the
neighbourhood of Charles, for he was not a Francis Sales, and if
Henrietta could once see below his queer exterior, she would never see
it again except to laugh at it with an understanding beyond the power
of irritation; and she was made to have a home, to be busy about
small, important things, to play with children and tyrannize over a
man in the matter of socks and collars, to be tyrannized over by him
in the bigger affairs of life.
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