“Yes,” she said, “I thought that would happen. I am very glad to hear it. Mamie is thorough and will suit you much better than Constance ever could. I wish that Constance were half as natural and enthusiastic and sensible. She has so much, but she has not that.”
“No enthusiasm?” asked George, remembering how he had lived upon her appreciation of his work.
“No. She has changed very much since you used to see her every day. You had a good influence over her, you stirred her mind, though you did not succeed in stirring her heart enough. She cares for nothing now, she never talks, never reads, never does anything but write long letters to Dr. Drinkwater about her poor people—or her soul, I do not quite know which. No, you need not look grave, I am not abusing her. Poor child, I wish I could do anything to make her forget that same soul of hers, and those eternal hospitals and charities! Your energy did her good. It roused her and made her think. She has a heart somewhere, I suppose, and she has plenty of head, but she smothers them both with her soul.”
“She will get over that,” said George. “She will outgrow it. It is only a phase.”
“She will never get over it, until she is married,” Grace answered in a tone of conviction.
“It is very strange. You talk now as if you were her mother instead of being her younger sister.”
“Her younger sister!” Grace exclaimed with a sigh. “I am a hundred years older than Constance. Older in everything, in knowing the meanings of the two great words—happiness and suffering.”
“Indeed, you may say that,” George answered in a low voice.
“I sometimes think that they are the only two words that have any meaning left for me, or that should mean anything to the rest of the world.”
The settled look of pain deepened upon her face as she spoke, not distorting nor changing the pure outlines, but lending them something solemn and noble that was almost grand. George looked at her with a sort of awe, and the great question of the meaning of all life and death rose before him, as he remembered her husband’s death grip upon his arm, and the moment when he himself had breathed in the cool water and given up the struggle. He had opened his eyes again to this world to see all that was to result of pain and suffering from the death of the other, whose sight had gone out for ever. They had been together in the depths. The one had been drowned and had taken with him the happiness of the woman he had loved. The other, he himself, had been saved and another woman’s life had been filled with sunshine. Why the one, rather than the other? He, who had always faced life as he had found it, and fought with whatever opposed him, asked himself whether there were any meaning in it all. Why should those two great things, happiness and suffering, be so unevenly distributed? Was poor John Bond a loss to humanity in the aggregate? Not a serious one. Did he, George Wood, care whether John Bond were alive or dead, beyond the decent regret he felt, or ought to feel? No, assuredly not. Would Constance have cared, if he had not chanced to be her sister’s husband, did Totty care, did Mamie care? No. They were all shocked, which is to say that their nerves, including his own, had been painfully agitated. And yet this man, John Bond, for whom nobody cared, but whom every one respected, had left behind him in one heart a grief that was almost awe-inspiring, a sorrow that sought no expression, and despised words, that painted its own image on the woman’s face and spread its own solemn atmosphere about her. A keen, cool, sharp-witted young lawyer, by the simple act of departing this world, had converted a pretty and very sensible young woman into a tragic muse, had lent her grandeur of mien, had rendered her imposing, had given her a dignity that momentarily placed her higher than other women in the scale of womanhood. Which was the real self? The self that was gone, or the one that remained? Had a great sorrow given the woman a fictitious importance, or had it revealed something noble in her which no one had known before? Whichever were true, Grace was no longer the Grace Fearing of old, and George felt a strange admiration for her growing up within him.