“She has shown so much more character, so much more heart, than I ever supposed she had, in this affair, that I’m glad to believe we were mistaken about her in several essential ways. The fact is, I always did have a sort of sneaking fondness for her, and now I’m determined to indulge it; so you needn’t come to laugh about her in my sleeve, William. I’m an ardent Farrellite, and have been ever since I found out that she was in love with your friend. Don’t you think she’s very devoted to him?”
“Oh, I dare say. He’s not in a state for devotion to tell upon, exactly.”
Mrs. Gilbert looked baffled. Presently she asked, “Are she and Rachel Woodward as good friends as ever?”
“How do I know?” returned Gilbert, resuming his walk. “That’s a curious girl, Susan. One meets enough good women in the world; I’ve always been able to believe in them,” he said, stopping at Mrs. Gilbert’s side to take her hand and kiss it; “in fact, the worst women seem pretty good, if one will only compare them with oneself; but I don’t think I’ve understood, before, just the sort of feminine goodness that the unbroken tradition of your New England religiousness produces. Puritanism has fairly died out of the belief—I don’t care what people profess to believe—but in such a girl as Rachel Woodward, all that was good in it seems to survive in the life. She’s more like Easton than any other human being I know; they’re both unerringly sincere; they’re both faithful through thick and thin to what they think is right; only you can’t help feeling that there’s something Quixotic in Easton’s noblest moods, and that he has an arrogant scorn of meaner morals than his own. But her purity doesn’t seem to judge anything but itself, and her goodness and veracity always seem to refer themselves to something outside of her. You can see before she speaks how she is considering her phrase, and choosing just the words that shall give her mind with scriptural scruple against superfluity; if you know the facts, you know what she will say, for she’s almost divinely without variableness or shadow of turning where the truth is concerned. It’s awful; it makes me hang my head for shame, to watch the working of that vestal soul of hers. And with all this inflexibility—you might call it angularity—of rectitude, she has a singular charm, a distinctly feminine charm.”
“Oh, indeed! And what is her charm?”
“Poh, Susan!” said Gilbert, looking askance at her. “Don’t make me think you can be guilty of bad taste.”
“Oh, well; I won’t, I won’t, my dear boy! I didn’t mean to,” cried Mrs. Gilbert. “It was rather foolish in me to interrupt you.”
“I can’t call it an interruption, exactly; I had got to the end of my say.”
He went off to Easton’s room, where he found Rachel Woodward putting things in order for the evening, and he smiled to see with what conscientious regard she preserved Mrs. Farrell’s arrangements, as matters having a sacred claim to which no reforms of her own could have pretended, and yet managed somehow to imbue all that picturesqueness with a quality of homelike comfort. He nodded to her, and said he was going out for a short walk.
On the road he overtook Mrs. Farrell, who was moving rather sadly along by herself. Her face brightened as she turned and saw him, but she waited for him to speak.