What would they say, those sympathising friends who had come to her in her conflict, with their well-meant phrases of support, and told her she had done so wisely, and shown so brave a spirit? What would they say to see her lower the lance and go back again to the bondage of her tyrant? How could she face their pity at her weakness? And then there were the others, who had disapproved of her conduct--had advised her to submit, yield something, and make it up; and when she would not, had turned away from knowing her. They would call her repentant, and perhaps would turn again to countenance her reformation! That would be more intolerable even than the pitying surprise of her stancher friends. No; she must follow out the road she had entered on. There could be no returning upon the lost steps. And she had so nearly yielded. It startled her to find she was so weak. She must build a barrier between the old life and the new, which could neither be surmounted nor thrown down.
Joseph was close upon her now. He had not been very long away, but he did not seem in her eyes exactly as he had seemed before. It was not half an hour that he had been gone, yet he looked more ordinary than she had supposed him. The redundancy of waistcoat, or rather of waist, offended her sense of symmetry as it had not done before; and if he had been just a little taller! Bertie was six-feet-one, and gracefully slim, and chestnut-haired, while the other's locks were darkening, as the leaves grow dark before the autumn tints begin to light them up with the rustiness that comes before decay. It was the difference between thirty and forty-seven. What a fool she was to notice such things, and at such a time, when the very contrary was what she would have wished to notice! She told herself so with vehemence, and bit her lip, as if that would make her mind it better; but she went on noticing all the same. When the eye has been turned for a little on the sun, what a poor, dim, purblind thing does the light of a candle afterwards appear!
Joseph came on with swinging elastic strides, impatient to be with her, irradiated with a joyful pride, and beaming on her with smiles of confidence irrepressible.
"If he would only have been tranquil!" she thought. This exuberance seemed so utterly out of place. It was a discord in the bland and half-parental warmth which, she told herself, would have been correct in view of their disparity of age. "It was bad taste. There was even an element of ridicule in a venerable Cupid of forty-seven exerting himself to gambol before her like one of those boy Loves with wings the artists picture. She had not thought so half an hour ago, but we live and change so quickly at times. He was too solid for that sort of thing, and she felt sorry to see him attempt it, for she really respected and liked him."