Perhaps the fact that their outlook was so similar proved the great bond between Mary and the minister of Elgo. Their upbringing and environment were so absolutely dissimilar, their views of life so unlike, yet beyond it all and through it all sounded the same note, dominating the discords and making harmony.
“He’s such a lovable good fellow,” Mary would say to herself. “One forgives him for always using shall and will in the wrong places, and for denying himself everything that some people think makes life endurable.”
“She is so kind and gracious, so dignified without being haughty, so absolute an aristocrat in all her beautiful ways; she is a princess. What does it matter if she does smoke and read French novels? If she does it, it must be right for her.” So argued the minister, though he kept his own sturdy Scottish opinion with regard to the unwholesomeness for ordinary digestions of some of the literature which Mary affected.
So the days went on and these two lovable good people saw more and more of one another, worshipper and worshipped, and although the parties mainly concerned preserved the ostrich-like blindness of people in their condition, the “summer visitors” of Elgo and the parish itself took a lively interest in their doings and waited with a somewhat impatient expectation of the climax.
One thing struck Andrew Methven as curious: in all their many conversations Mary had never mentioned her husband. She talked frankly of her father and her brothers, of the people she had met in India, and of those she was in the habit of meeting in London, but of her husband, never. Andrew found himself wondering what manner of man Captain Burton had been; but it never occurred to him to try to find out anything about Mary or her surroundings. He never spoke of her to anyone, and winced if anyone spoke of her to him. About his own family and his own “past,” if so uneventful life can be said to have a past, he was most frank.
“My people are what you would call ‘nice middle-class’ people, perhaps a little fonder of books than their sort are in England, but you have never met anybody of that kind except me, and you would not find them congenial.”
Mary made a little face. “I’m sure I never spoke of anybody as a ‘nice middle-class person,’ I shouldn’t be such a snob, and I have met all sorts of people—people you would think Bohemian and terrible!”
“I should like to meet literary people,” said Andrew wistfully, “but I suppose I never shall.”
“Oh, yes, you will, and you won’t find them any more interesting than your Fifeshire fisher folk. Epigrams pall upon you when they form the staple commodity of conversation. The somewhat dingy journalist, who has a trick of smart talking and who poses to himself as everything he is not, is just as great a bore as the respectable city clerk who lives at Hornsey and expatiates upon its advantages. You must not mistake cleverness for genius. The one is often merely the result of environment and atmosphere. The other nearly always appears in unlikely and seemingly impossible places. You know what Swinburne says: ‘There is only one thing we may reverence, and that is genius. There is only one thing we may worship, and that is goodness.’”
“It seems to me,” said Andrew thoughtfully, “that you reverse it. You reverence goodness and worship genius!”