The temperament attached to these painful disabilities had been warm and strongly womanly. Born a century or so earlier, in a French Court, or any great world vivid with picturesque living, she would in all probability have been a remarkable personage, her ugliness a sort of distinction; but she had been born in Willowfield, and had lived its life and been bound by its limits. She had been comfortably well off—she had a large square house with a garden, an income sufficient to provide for extremely respectable existence in Willowfield, but not large enough to allow of experiments with the outside world. She had never met a man whom she could have loved, who would have loved her, and she was essentially—though Willowfield would never have dreamed it—a woman who should have loved and mated. A lifetime of narrow, unstimulating years and thwarted instincts had made age treat her ill. She was a thin woman with burning eyes, and a personality people were afraid of.
She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination. If she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the engagement would end; when it had ended in marriage she had not wondered, but she had seen many things other people did not see. “He is not in love with her,” had been her mental decision, “but he is emotional, and he is in love with her being in love with him. There is no foretelling what will come of it.”
Baird had found himself attracted by Miss Amory. He did not know that if she had been young she would, despite her ugliness, have had a powerful feminine effect on him. He used to go and talk to her, and he was not conscious that he went when he was made restless by a lack of something in the mental atmosphere about him. He could talk to her as he could not talk to the rest of Willowfield. She read and thought and argued with herself, and as a product of a provincial dogmatic New England town was a curious development.
“Were you once a brilliant, wicked, feminine mover of things in some old French court?” he said to her once.
They had been plunging deep into the solving of unsolvable problems, and she turned her burning old eyes on him as she answered.
“God knows what I was,” she said, “but it was nothing like this—nothing like this—and I was not wicked.”
“No,” Baird replied, “you were not wicked; but you broke laws.”
“Yes, I broke laws,” she agreed; “but they were hideous laws—better broken than kept.”
She had been puzzled by the fact that after his wife left him he had had a restless period and had seemed to pass through a miserable phase, such as a man suffering from love and longing might endure.
“Has he fallen in love with her because she has gone away?” she wondered; “men are capable of it at times.”