“Then I shall wither in single blessedness; I shall be unhappily not married instead of unhappily married.”
“Philip Towne is your ideal.”
“I know it,” she said. “I like to think that he is in the world. He makes me as happy as a pansy.”
“Women are never happy with their ideals.”
“They seldom have an opportunity of testing it; Professor Towne has a pure heart and he has brains.”
Dr. Towne answered in words that she never forgot, “That is what he says of you.”
“Oh, I am so glad! I like to have that said of me better than any thing.”
She remembered, but she would not tell him, that a lady had said of him, having seen him but a few moments, and not having heard him speak, that he was a “rock.”
“And I love rocks and know all about them,” she had added.
“They give shadow in a weary land,” Tessa had thought. “I have been in a weary land and he has not been a shadow to me.”