“I have prayed night and morning,” the elder woman went on in the same pleading whisper, “that strength might be given you, and I think my prayers were heard. For you have been strong, and no one has known except me, and I do not matter. The strength must have come from somewhere. I like to think that I had something to do with it, however little.”
Again there was a silence. Across the quiet garden, from the church that was hidden among the trees, the sound of the evening hymn came rising and falling, the harshness of the rustic voices toned down by the whispering of the leaves.
“I know,” Mrs. Glynde went on, speaking perhaps out of her own experience, “that now it must seem that there is nothing left. I know that It can never come to you, but something else may—a sort of alleviation; something that is a little stronger than resignation, and many people think that it is love. It is not love; never believe that! But it is surely sent because so many women have—to go through life—without that—which makes life worth living.”
“Hush, dear!” said Dora; and Mrs. Glynde paused as if to collect herself. Perhaps her daughter stopped her just in time.
“There is,” she went on in a calmer voice, “a sort of satisfaction in the duties that come and have to be performed. The duties towards one's husband and the others—the others, darling—are the best. They are not the same, not the same as if—as they might have been, but sometimes it is a great alleviation. And the time passes somehow.”
It is not the clever people who make all the epigrams; but sometimes those who merely live and feel, and are perhaps objects of ridicule. Mrs. Glynde was one of these. She had unwittingly made an epigram. She had summed up life in five words—the time passes somehow.”
“And, dear,” she went on, “it is not wise, perhaps it is not quite right, to turn one's back upon an alleviation which is offered. Arthur would be very kind to you. He is really fond of you, and perhaps the very fact of his not being clever or brilliant or anything like that might be a blessing in the future, for he would not expect so much.”
“He would have to expect nothing,” said Dora, speaking for the first time, “because I could give him nothing.”
She spoke in rather an indifferent voice, and in the gloom her mother could not see her face. It was a singular thing that neither of them seemed to take Arthur Agar's feelings into account in the very smallest degree; and this must be accounted to them for wisdom.
Dora was, as her mother had said, very strong. She never gave way. Her delicate lips never quivered, but she took care to keep them close pressed. Only in her eyes was the pain to be seen, and perhaps that was why her mother did not dare to look.