Margery had sometimes considered the wisdom of confiding her difficulties to Mrs. Huxam; but she had never done so. She was not proud for herself, but still felt very proud for Jacob; and to confess the truth would be to weaken him in her mother's eyes. In a sense she was glad that her husband could be jealous of her, since she supposed that such an emotion only existed in connection with very deep and passionate love; and if he had long since ceased to give any outward signs of such a love, (by sacrificing himself more to her reasonable tastes, for example) jealousy, she thought, must none the less prove that fierce affection still existed unseen. She, therefore, conscious of the baselessness of his error, troubled only occasionally about it and was wholly ignorant of its extent, of its formidable and invisible roots in his nature, ever twining and twisting deeper for their food, and finding it in his own imagination alone. So she kept dumb concerning her discomfort, and indeed, disregarded it, save at the fitful intervals when it was made manifest before her eyes. And she erred in supposing these almost childish irruptions sprang from no deep central flame. To her they were in a measure absurd, because she knew that they were founded upon nothing; but her error lay in ignorance of origins: she had never glimpsed the secret edifice that her husband had built—a house of dreams, but a house solid and real and full of awful shadows for him.
They walked home together presently and Margery told Jacob how greatly he had pleased her father.
"I know him so well," she said. "It moved him a great deal."
"It didn't move your mother, however."
"Yes it did; but you understand her way of looking at things—at everything that comes along."
"What did you think of the land regarded as discipline for them?"
"I thought it rather fine," said Margery. "It was so like mother. We can't appreciate the high, unchanging line she takes. It doesn't surprise her when men do generous things, any more than it surprises her when they do wicked things. That's her knowledge of human nature. And the pluck of her! How many are there who don't feel favours to be a bit of a nuisance; and how many have the courage to say so frankly?"
Jacob considered this.
"Wouldn't you have felt just the same, even if you weren't stern enough to say it?" she asked.
"Yes—I suppose I should."