Uncle Rudolph could just bear Mrs. Barnes when he could get away from her; to-day he can't bear her at all. Everything that should be characteristic of a dean—patience, courtesy, kindliness, has been stripped off him by his eagerness to propose and the impossibility of doing it. There's nothing at all left now of what he was but that empty symbol, his apron.
October 10th.
My uncle is fermenting with checked, prevented courting. And he ought to be back in England. He ought to have gone back almost at once, he says. He only came out for three or four days—
'Yes; just time to settle me in,' I said.
'Yes,' he said, smiling, 'and then take you home with me by the ear.'
He has some very important meetings he is to preside at coming off soon, and here he is, hung up. It is Mrs. Barnes who is the cause of it, and naturally he isn't very nice to her. In vain does she try to please him; the one thing he wants her to do, to go away and leave him with Dolly, she of course doesn't. She sits there, saying meek things about the weather, expressing a modest optimism, ready to relinquish even that if my uncle differs, becoming, when he takes up a book, respectfully quiet, ready the moment he puts it down to rejoice with him if he wishes to rejoice or weep with him if he prefers weeping; and the more she is concerned to give satisfaction the less well-disposed is he towards her. He can't forgive her inexplicable fixedness. Her persistent, unintermittent gregariousness is incomprehensible to him. All he wants, being reduced to simplicity by love, is to be left alone with Dolly. He can't understand, being a man, why if he wants this he shouldn't get it.
'You're not kind to Mrs. Barnes,' I said to him this afternoon. 'You've made her quite unnatural. She is cowed.'
'I am unable to like her,' said my uncle shortly.
'You are quite wrong not to. She has had bitter troubles, and is all goodness. I don't think I ever met anybody so completely unselfish.'
'I wish she would go and be unselfish in her own room, then,' said my uncle.