A Pair of Patient Lovers | Page 7

hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the
notion of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the
moment when he saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In
justice to Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a
show of his own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came
to Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have
thought he was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the
background. He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival,
in which he had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible;
and after that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and
her mother a week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable
because his church and his rectory were just across the street from the
Conwell place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their
wooden gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green
in front of them was planted.
During all that time Glendenning's personal elevation remained
invisible to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most

lamentable of fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that
he might not have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of
joy that was almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs.
Bentley openly approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not
have quite abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible
for us, and it must have been such a load off him when she took that
turn with us.
She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the
same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That
is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had
been on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her
mother in her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of
our first meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to
intimacies of feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted
lover, and we made our conclusions that however subject he might be
to his indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his
wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it him;
and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which almost
amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was with
one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so perfect
that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like that could
keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she liked us as
well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty to seem to like
us a great deal more.
She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her
from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned
incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn
into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning's
apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he
had an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more
and more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss
Bentley, and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair,
and his pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an
emotional equality with her. He was very handsome, with features
excellently regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay

lights danced in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that
were a lighter blond than his beard and hair.
VI.
The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town,
he came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and
fell simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much
fuller in my wife's presence than he had been with me alone, and told
us the hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley's yielding within a reasonable time.
He seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got
the affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her
daughter's marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her
engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not
persist in it.
"There is