But it cost both me and my wife some time and some suffering before we learned how to deport ourselves in these respects.
In the same manner she avoided the too near, because unprofitable, approaches of a portion of the richer part of the community. For from her probable position in time to come, rather than her position in time past, many of the fashionable people in the county began to call upon her—in no small degree to her annoyance, simply from the fact that she and they had so little in common. So, while she performed all towards them that etiquette demanded, she excused herself from the closer intimacy which some of them courted, on the ground of the many duties which naturally fell to the parson’s wife in a country parish like ours; and I am sure that long before we had gained the footing we now have, we had begun to reap the benefits of this mode of regarding our duty in the parish as one, springing from the same source, and tending to the same end. The parson’s wife who takes to herself authority in virtue of her position, and the parson’s wife who disclaims all connexion with the professional work of her husband, are equally out of place in being parsons’ wives. The one who refuses to serve denies her greatest privilege; the one who will be a mistress receives the greater condemnation. When the wife is one with her husband, and the husband is worthy, the position will soon reveal itself.
But there cannot be many clergymen’s wives amongst my readers; and I may have occupied more space than reasonable with this “large discourse.” I apologize, and, there is room to fear, go on to do the same again.
As I write I am seated in that little octagonal room overlooking the quarry, with its green lining of trees, and its deep central well. It is my study now. My wife is not yet too old to prefer the little room in which she thought and suffered so much, to every other, although the stair that leads to it is high and steep. Nor do I object to her preference because there is no ready way to reach it save through this: I see her the oftener. And although I do not like any one to look over my shoulder while I write—it disconcerts me somehow—yet the moment the sheet is finished and flung on the heap, it is her property, as the print, reader, is yours. I hear her step overhead now. She is opening her window. Now I hear her door close; and now her foot is on the stair.
“Come in, love. I have just finished another sheet. There it is. What shall I end the book with? What shall I tell the friends with whom I have been conversing so often and so long for the last thing ere for a little while I bid them good-bye?”
And Ethelwyn bends her smooth forehead—for she has a smooth forehead still, although the hair that crowns it is almost white—over the last few sheets; and while she reads, I will tell those who will read, one of the good things that come of being married. It is, that there is one face upon which the changes come without your seeing them; or rather, there is one face which you can still see the same through all the shadows which years have gathered and heaped upon it. No, stay; I have got a better way of putting it still: there is one face whose final beauty you can see the mere clearly as the bloom of youth departs, and the loveliness of wisdom and the beauty of holiness take its place; for in it you behold all that you loved before, veiled, it is true, but glowing with gathered brilliance under the veil (“Stop one moment, my dear”) from which it will one day shine out like the moon from under a cloud, when a stream of the upper air floats it from off her face.
“Now, Ethelwyn, I am ready. What shall I write about next?”
“I don’t think you have told them anywhere about Tom.”
“No more I have. I meant to do so. But I am ashamed of it.”
“The more reason to tell it.”