There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails. Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.
Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of unconcealed reproach.
To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of impotent ability.
Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations, and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their feet.
Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the first to pick him out.
"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."
And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances would shoot from Fanny to Mary and back again as though she could steal the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.
It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse, to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her chair to hear what they had to report.
And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those other three and said--
"What a suck for everybody!"