“Dan,” cried Alice intensely, “why didn't you tell me?”
“Why, I thought you knew it,” he explained easily. “She likes to read, and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don't suppose I get more than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She makes the girls write. But you needn't mind her not writing. You may be sure she's glad of your letters.”
“It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there's no chance of her answering,” Alice grieved. “It's as if I had passed over your sisters' heads. I ought to have written to them.”
“Oh, well, you can do that now,” said Dan soothingly.
“No. No, I can't do it now. It would be ridiculous.” She was silent, and presently she asked, “Is there anything else about your mother that I ought to know?” She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline in her eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course of things, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him, that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.
His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that was in it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seem the moment. “I can't say that there is,” he answered coldly.
In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went a great deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almost of defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed with it. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemed to do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made him laugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, and then left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow her in them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with her they seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over very hypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy they resumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisation which the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts and purposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps, have attached to them. They discussed them and analysed them with a satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without an effect of caricature. They measured Alice's romance together, and evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion, which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice's waist. When he had accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think, to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.
She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so, that it was all wrong.
“But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them so,” suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice's misgivings over with her, “aren't they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn't it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such perfect counterparts—”
“Yes,” the girl assented, “that's what we're taught to believe.” She meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.