For her pride sustained her; and when that failed, her love came to her aid.
How she loved him, how she clung to him in those days, no one but Maurice knew; in her bitterest hours his words had power to comfort her and take the sting from her pain. When it was possible, she hid her troubles from him, and never added to his by vain repinings and regrets.
But in spite of Nea’s courage and Maurice’s patience, they had a terribly hard life of it.
At first Maurice’s efforts to find another clerkship were in vain, and they were compelled to live on the proceeds of the check; then Nea sold her jewels, that they might have something to fall back upon. But presently Mr. Dobson came to their aid.
He had a large family, and could not do much, as he told them, sorrowfully; but he found Maurice, with some trouble, a small clerkship at eighty pounds a year, advising him at the same time to eke out their scanty income by taking in copying work of an evening.
Indeed, as Maurice discovered many a time in his need, he did not want a friend as long as the good manager lived.
And so those two young creatures took up the heavy burden of their life, and carried it with tolerable patience and courage; and as in the case of our first parents, exiled by a woman’s weakness from the fair gardens of Paradise, so, though they reaped thorns and thistles, and earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, yet the bitter-sweet memories of their lost Eden abode with them, and in their poverty they tasted many an hour of pure unsullied love.
For they were young, and youth’s courage is high, and the burden of those days was not yet too hard to be borne.
Nea longed to help Maurice, but her pride, always her chief fault, came as a stumbling-block in her way; she could not bear to go into the world and face strangers. And Maurice on his side could not endure the thought that his beautiful young wife should be exposed to slights and humiliations; so Nea’s fine talent wasted by misuse.
Still, even these scruples would have faded under the pressure of severer needs, had no children come to weaken Nea’s strength and keep her drudging at home.