And now had he a chance again?--or was it all to end in disappointment once more, in that cold disappointment of the heart that has received stones for bread? It was not entirely his own fault; he had expected much from life, and hitherto had received very little. But Robinette!
"Let me find all her faults now," he said to himself, "or evermore keep silent; meantime I hope I am not concealing too many of my own."
He tried to force himself into criticism; to look at her as a cold observer from the outside would have done; for that curious Border country of Love which he had entered has not an equable climate at all. It is fire and frost alternate; and criticism is either roused almost to a morbid pitch, or else the faculty is drugged, and nothing, not even the enumeration of a hundred foibles will awaken it for a time.
When the cold fit had been upon him the evening before, Lavendar had said to himself that her manner was too free--that she had led him on too quickly; no, that expression was dishonourable and unjust; he repented it instantly; she had been too unself-conscious, too girlish, too unthinking, in what she said and did. "But she's a widow after all, though she's only two and twenty," he went on to himself. "Hang it! I wish she were not! If her heart were in her husband's grave I should be moaning at that; and because I see that it is not, I become critical. There's nothing quite perfect in life!"
He had begun by noticing some little defects in her personal appearance, but he was long past that now; what did such trifles matter, here or there? Then he remembered all that he had heard said about American women. Did those pretty clothes of hers mean that she would be extravagant and selfish to obtain them? Could a young man with no great fortune offer her the luxury that was necessary to her? and even so, what changes come with time! He had a full realization of what the boredom of family life can be, when passion has grown stale.
"At seventy, say, when I am palsied and she is old and fat, will romance be alive then? Will such feeling leave anything real behind it when it falls away, as the white blossoms on Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree will shrink and fall a fortnight hence?"