This was a very dreadful idea to her. She strangled it.
There is no getting rid of thoughts. If they are strangled their corpses remain and rot in the mind, to its lasting detriment. This idea remained in Mary’s mind, cold and dead, and gradually poisoned the sweetness of her nature.
A fixed idea is a dead idea.
Mary’s temper suffered, and she vented her spleen on her pupils to such a degree that there came a time when she had only one left—the youngest daughter of the sausage-machine manufacturing widower, all of whose daughters she had instructed in turn in a polite mastery of the violin. Her bi-weekly visits to his house had become part of the routine of his household, and she was part and parcel of its furniture, being fitted into the heavy dinner-parties when there was a gap. At other entertainments she was never omitted and was as much part of their colour as the faded best chair-covers that were taken out for the occasion or the Japanese lanterns which illuminated them. She was useful, for she was always willing to play the piano for hours on end when the young people wanted to dance. To the widower, who never saw her on other occasions, she was always associated with gaiety.
One day he proposed marriage to her, and she refused him.
“Be sure,” he said, “that I shall always be your friend. And I shall continue to hope.”
He was really relieved at being rejected, and retired to cogitate the extraordinary impulse which had driven him to do such a thing. He felt very uncomfortable, for the fictions with which he had surrounded his dead wife had been shaken.
Mary left his house in a flutter. The man had always been kind to her, he was an admirable father, and she had always respected him as a solid man, though he was a little too Northernly solid to be taken altogether seriously. His house was very comfortable, though ugly and too reekingly prosperous, but the habit of years had made it a corner of the equilateral triangle of her life. Its atmosphere was altogether different from that of her home and delivered her from monotony.
Her only feeling about his proposal of marriage was one of surprise. She thought of it only materially and was not signally disturbed by it until he sent her an extraordinary letter in which he sought to explain away his behaviour. In the course of it he cut deeper in his contemplation of the marriage—having been married—and had, unwittingly, set his emotions stirring. Mary’s emotions responded, but her modesty plucked them back. She did not, she told herself, “love” Mr. Hargreave, because, after all, he was only a common man who had begun life as a boy in a smithy. It had been easy enough when she thought of marriage as a mere translation from one house to another, but, quite clearly, he was asking for a personal relation, and from that she shrank, chiefly because it was a change from the custom of years. When she desired a concrete objection she fished out from the confusion in her mind the prejudiced idea that she would be a stepmother; worse than that, a stepmother to children to whom she had been a paid instructress, children moreover who had, upon occasion, been so cruel to her that she had been unable to retort upon them or to maintain discipline. . . . She read Mr. Hargreave’s letter once more and saw that she could not easily enter his house again, except it were to leave her home.