Many apprehensions were set at rest by the sight of her entering a room on his arm, carefully and beautifully dressed, as if she had enjoyed dressing herself, and twinkling with diamonds everywhere, responding to respectful greetings with quiet grace, moving in her comparatively higher sphere as if she felt thoroughly at home in it. It seemed to the anxious matron that an end had been reached which justified all the means that had been taken to compass it.
Mrs. Reade was not so satisfied. She looked at the change in Rachel from another point of view. She did not like to see a girl who had been exceptionally girlish, turned into a sober woman with such unnatural rapidity.
Her sister Laura had come home, and was now settled at Kew, giving entertainments in a severely-appointed high-art house; she had had quite as much of the education of travel as Rachel—perhaps more, inasmuch as her young husband was a dabbler in bric-à-bric, and had a taste for old churches, and palaces, and pictures; whereas Mr. Kingston's interest in foreign cities, however famous, had chiefly concerned itself with the quality of the society and the cuisine of the hotels.
But Laura, though stored with information and experience, and lately the happy mother of twin daughters, was much the same as she had been in her maiden days—cheerful, enterprising, a rider of harmless hobbies, a great believer in herself, and in the force and variety of her fascinations.
She had improved and developed, of course, but the experiences of travel had not changed her as Rachel was changed.
The acute little woman who practically had never solved the meaning of love and marriage, and quite understood her disqualifications in this respect, yet had glimmerings of the state of things that existed in Rachel's heart. She knew—though she had come to the knowledge by slow degrees—that the girl was not weak all through, but only weak as the water-lily is,
"Whose root is fix'd in stable earth, whose head
Floats on the tossing waves."
And that just as she had been tenacious of certain principles in her earlier life, when living with her father in an atmosphere which she had only her own instinct to teach her was tainted with dishonour, so she would hold fast to some other things, if they had taken root, with a secret, blind integrity in spite of her emotional fluctuations in the winds and waves of circumstance.
She had adapted herself to the conditions of her marriage with the pliant submissiveness of her disposition; but there was a part of her that refused to be reconciled to all the degradation that was involved, and it was a tough and vital part of her.
Since this was violently repressed, comprehending as it did all those aspiring ideals which had had so much poetry and promise, and which represented for her, in their loss as in their possession, the meaning of human happiness and the diviner aspect of human life, there was naturally a great vacuum somewhere—a great emptiness for which no compensating interests were available. Hence that serene inexpressiveness of mien and manner which had so mature and distinguished an air.