Miss Devereux, spinster

by Agnes Giberne

She turned away with a sigh, making no answer, and the frown on the General's brow was stamped there during many hours. He thought Evelyn was wilfully bent on opposing him.

It was difficult, perhaps, for him to think otherwise, when she would not attempt to make her motives clear; yet no doubt it was difficult also for Evelyn to enter on such an attempt, when she had so often tried and failed. The state of tension between them had grown gradually out of an utter discrepancy of mind and character, at least not less in degree than the discrepancy of age. In such cases, it is often most difficult to say where the blame lies.

For he was so good, so earnest, a man: and withal so fixed in his views. When he had made up his mind, he had made up his mind, and nothing could move him. This was a marked idiosyncrasy, a part of his very nature; and it was equally shown on questions of great moment and of passing interest.

On almost every conceivable subject of importance, he had come to definite conclusions some thirty or forty years earlier; and he had not since deviated by a hair's breadth, at least not consciously, from the neat solution of each difficulty, then laid down by himself for his own instruction. He was never troubled by a shadow of doubt that his opinions might not be absolutely and altogether right. He never thought it possible that here or there he might be mistaken. He had his Bible; he studied it; he reached certain conclusions. When other people, studying their Bibles no less earnestly, reached different conclusions, they of course were wrong.

He was too gentlemanly and kind-hearted to judge them harshly in words; but he always felt their deviations from truth, as held by himself, to be sad and perplexing; and he had no pleasure in their society. His friends were always those who agreed with himself, who submitted to his dictum. All who did so agree, he accepted and believed in thoroughly; so thoroughly that, as we have seen, Evelyn was hopeless of her power to disturb that belief. All who did not so agree were relegated to the outer circle of mere acquaintances.

But he could not so relegate his wife: and Evelyn by no means agreed with him on all points. She made no effort to conceal the fact; and this was a lasting grief to the single-eyed simple-hearted man. For if he were inevitably always in the right, she must of necessity, where she differed from him, be always in the wrong.

Evelyn's mind and character were in many respects a complete enigma to the General. He could not fathom her; could not grasp the complexities of a nature so unlike his own. It was not his fault. A short-sighted man cannot fairly be blamed for not seeing so far as a long-sighted man.

The General, with all his real goodness and nobleness, had a narrow make of mind, a contracted mental vision. And at sixty-two or sixty-three years of age, he was incapable of gauging his young wife of twenty-five. She had not yet come to her full growth. She was expanding, gaining fresh knowledge, assimilating new thoughts, year by year. He had been petrified early into a permanent shape; and for thirty or forty years past, he had almost ceased to expand. How could the two minds suit?

Evelyn's restless thought, her searching into the foundations of statements which he accepted en bloc, her eager listening to fresh theories, her weariness of religious strifes and factious oppositions—all of these he resolved with sorrowful haste into "dangerous tendencies," and to all of these, he set himself in resolute opposition. He was indeed most willing to discuss vexed questions with her; and he would never, like many men, forget his gentlemanliness in the heat of argument; but he always began and ended with the assumption that he himself was inevitably right, and he had no power to see her side of the matter.

So it came to pass that Evelyn fell into a habit of systematically evading all discussion; not merely all religious discussion, which under the circumstances was no doubt her wisest course, but all discussion of most everyday matters. If he found fault, she offered no defence. If he misjudged her, she attempted no explanation. It was "no use," she told herself. Such a state of things, which in any other relationship of life would be hardly more than endurable, when existing between a husband and wife could not but result in distress and isolation.