"You have no need to fear, Arthur; I am satisfied with you. I think I shall not make you vain when I tell you that your manners are fitted for any circle."
Arthur's mother gazed fondly upon him as he replied, "It is an inheritance, sir, as are honour and truth, which I owe equally to you."
"I must confess that it was not with entire confidence I saw you depart for your travels, but you have returned improved, if anything. Contact with the world has already improved you, and has opened your mind to the value of the requirements of society."
"Whether it be so," said Arthur, with seriousness, "has yet to be proved. In the New World, with its rougher manners, I have seen much to admire--more, indeed, than in these more civilised surroundings. It is not whether they are fitted for me--it is whether I am fitted for them."
"There is plenty of romance to be found in these more sober scenes; it will come to you, Arthur, as it has come to others."
"In what shape, sir? And have you met with yours?"
Mr. Temple coloured slightly, and devoted himself more closely to his paper, which he was perusing in the intervals of the conversation. Mrs. Temple sighed and looked away. Arthur had inadvertently touched a chord which vibrated keenly in the breasts of his parents. He did not know, and had never heard, that his father had married for money and position, had married without love, but it was no less a fact. A fact of which his mother was not aware until after marriage. It was not a sudden discovery on her part; it was a gradual awakening, made more bitter by the womanly suspicion of another face, fairer perhaps than hers, and better loved in the past. In this she invested Mr. Temple with qualities which he did not possess, and fashioned a hero--not hers, but another woman's--out of very common clay. There had never been any bickerings between her and her husband; she had not distressed him with any outburst of jealously; and he gave her no cause for complaint that the world would have recognised and sympathised with. He was an exemplary husband, faithful and attentive, and was held up as a model by other wives. Mrs. Temple, before her marriage, had had her romance in her love for her husband; a romance carefully fed by him at that time, for he played the lover skillfully. But shortly after they became man and wife her dreams faded slowly and surely away. She saw that he had no heart for her, and it was most natural in her to be positive that, with his attractive person and the soft blandishments of speech of which she had had experience when he wooed her, he had bestowed his heart elsewhere. She kept her secret well, and he was ignorant of it. Had she led him to suspect that she believed herself to be betrayed, it would have caused him much amazement. In the early years of her married life she was not regardless of his movements, but she made no discovery to confirm her jealousy. She was in the habit of watching his expressions when he opened his letters, and of listening with agonised attention to the murmurings in his sleep; but she learnt nothing. Had there been anything to discover she would not have discovered it; she was no match for him in subtlety. Slowly she accepted her fate, with no outward repining, and they lived that calm passionless life which to some souls is worse than death, and which with some highly nervous organisations occasionally leads to violent terminations and tragic results.
"You were saying, Arthur," said Mr. Temple, with a direct evasion of Arthur's light question, "that you saw much to admire in the rough manners of the men among whom you travelled."
"Very much, sir. The proper assertion of a proper independence, for instance. The kingliness of manhood has no such exemplification in this city of unrest as it has in the free air of the New World, where men and women are not unhealthfully crowded together in small spaces. I see here, among the lower classes of society, no such free step, no such blithe spirits, as I have been accustomed to see among men in the same position at the other end of the world."
"There are grades even there, Arthur."