Adela Cathcart, vol 3 | Page 7

her countenance the expression of a mental spring-time. For the
mind has its seasons four, with many changes, as well as the world,
only that the cycles are generally longer: they can hardly be more
mingled than as here in our climate.
Let me confess, now that the subject of the confession no longer exists,
that there had been something about Adela that, pet-child of mine as
she was, had troubled me. In all her behaviour, so far as I had had any
opportunity of judging, she had been as good as my desires at least. But
there was a want in her face, a certain flatness of expression which I did
not like. I love the common with all my heart, but I hate the
common-place; and, foolish old bachelor that I am, the common-place
in a woman troubles me, annoys me, makes me miserable. Well, it was
something of the common-place in Adela's expression that had troubled

me. Her eyes were clear, with lovely long dark lashes, but somehow the
light in them had been always the same; and occasionally when I talked
to her of the things I most wished her to care about, there was such an
immobile condition of the features, associated with such a ready assent
in words, that I felt her notion of what I meant must be something very
different indeed from what I did mean. Her face looked as if it were
made of something too thick for the inward light to shine through--wax,
and not living muscle and skin. The fact was, the light within had not
been kindled, else that face of hers would have been ready enough to
let it shine out. Hitherto she had not seemed to me to belong at all to
that company that praises God with sweet looks, as Thomas Hood
describes Ruth as doing. What was wanting I had found it difficult to
define. Her soul was asleep. She was dreaming a child's dreams, instead
of seeing a woman's realities--realities that awake the swift play of
feature, as the wind of God arouses the expression of a still landscape.
So there seemed after all a gulf between her and me. She did not see
what I saw, feel what I felt, seek what I sought. Occasionally even, the
delicate young girl, pure and bright as the snow that hung on the
boughs around me, would shock the wizened old bachelor with her
worldliness--a worldliness that lay only in the use of current worldly
phrases of selfish contentment, or selfish care. Ah! how little do young
beauties understand of the pitiful emotions which they sometimes rouse
in the breasts of men whom they suppose to be absorbed in admiration
of them! But for faith that these girls are God's work and only half
made yet, one would turn from them with sadness, almost painful
dislike, and take refuge with some noble-faced grandmother, or
withered old maid, whose features tell of sorrow and patience. And the
beauty would think with herself that such a middle-aged gentleman did
not admire pretty girls, and was severe and unkind and puritanical;
whereas it was the lack of beauty that made him turn away; the
disappointment of a face--dull, that ought to be radiant; or the presence
of only that sort of beauty, which in middle age, except the deeper
nature should meantime come into play, would be worse than
common-place--would be mingled with the trail of more or less guilty
sensuality. Many a woman at forty is repulsive, whom common men
found at twenty irresistibly attractive; and many a woman at seventy is
lovely to the eyes of the man who would have been compelled to allow

that she was decidedly plain at seventeen.
"Maidens' bairns are aye weel guided," says the Scotch proverb; and
the same may be said of bachelors' wives. So I will cease the strain, and
return to Adela, the change in whom first roused it.
Of late, I had seen a glimmer of something in her countenance which I
had never seen before--a something which, the first time I perceived it,
made me say to her, in my own hearing only: "Ah, my dear, we shall
understand each other by and by!" And now and then the light in her
eye would be dimmed as by the fore-shadowing of a tear, when there
was no immediate and visible cause to account for it; and--which was
very strange--I could not help fancying she began to be a little shy of
her old uncle.--Could it be that she was afraid of his insight reaching to
her heart, and reading there more than she was yet willing to confess to
herself?--But whatever the cause of the change might be, there was
certainly a responsiveness in her, a readiness