"Oh, Cousin Alice!"
"It irritates me, because it's not Natalie's true character. She had a mind of her own once, and a good one. Actually, she's superior to Leonard——"
"He's a very brilliant man, Cousin."
"To look at, and glib; but inferior to his wife. Men generally are. Yet she effaces herself. She overdoes her loyalty. She is playing a part!"
"Cousin Alice!" remonstrated Paula.
"I don't mean she's consciously a hypocrite, and you needn't flare. She's imbibed some absurd notions of wifely duty, and is trying to carry them out."
An impression made upon an observer as keen as Mrs. Joe must have a foundation. In her irritation the lady had expressed the truth. Natalie was playing a part.
Since the day in St. Roch when she, recalling a day long past, had lost herself in a dream of what might have been—since then she had been playing a part, the part of a penitent; the role she had assumed when later, in humiliation and conscience-stricken, she had prostrated herself before heaven, vowing the only atonement possible.
She had seen the beginning of that change in Leonard which remained a cause of irritation to Mrs. Joe; nor had she been ignorant of the influences to which it was in part to be ascribed; but her conscience had whispered that in very truth the effect of those influences was to be attributed to herself. In her marriage an essential element had been absent, and was wanting still. To complete that holy mystery and adorn it with its rarer graces, to tinge its atmosphere with consecrated incense, there must be spiritual union. If Leonard had not learned of nobler joys than the lesser gratification that engaged his thoughts, was it not because such joys had not been offered?
To those religious teachings which had been deferred she now looked forward as to the means whereby both could attain to that higher union which she craved, and which when attained would surely soothe her troubled spirit and aid in that atonement prescribed by her conscience and which she had vowed, and of which the subservience disapproved by Mrs. Joe was a minor manifestation. So, though timidly, for his reluctance (so strange to her) was apparent, she sought to bring Leonard to discussion of religious subjects.