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Estuaries: Monitoring and
Modeling the Physical System
Jack Hardisty
Blackwell
Publishing

© 2007 by Jack Hardisty
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
The right of Jack Hardisty to be identiﬁed as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK
Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK
Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hardisty, J. (Jack), 1955-
Estuaries : monitoring and modeling the physical system / Jack Hardisty
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-4642-5 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-4642-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Estuarine oceanography. 2. Estuarine oceanography–Mathematical
models. I. Title.
GC97.H37 2007
551.46’18–dc22
2006029752
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Set in 10.5/12.5 Meridien
by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Singapore
by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd
The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has
been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the
publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation
standards.
For further information on
Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:
www.blackwellpublishing.com

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Estuarine toolboxes xi
Dynamic Internet references xiii
Part I: Evolution and Monitoring 1
1 Introduction to estuarine
systems 3
1.1 Introduction 3
1.2 Origins, climate, and ice ages 5
1.3 Web site systems 5
1.4 Sea-level rise and estuaries 8
1.5 Bathymetry 13
1.6 Tides 15
1.7 Currents 15
1.8 Temperature and salinity 15
1.9 Particulates 18
1.10 Classification of estuaries 18
2 Monitoring estuarine systems 23
2.1 Introduction 23
2.2 Bathymetric surveying 23
2.3 Tide gauges 25
2.4 Current metering 28
2.5 Thermometry 31
2.6 Estuarine salinity
determinations 32
2.7 Estuarine particulates 34
Part II: The Bathymetry of
Estuaries 39
3 Estuarine bathymetry 41
3.1 Introduction 41
3.2 A brief history of hydrography 41
3.3 Charted depths 42
3.4 Width and depth as functions
of distance 43
3.5 Width and depth as
exponential functions of
distance 43
3.6 Equilibrium cross-section 45
3.7 Estuarine plan form 46
3.8 Bathymetric change 46
3.9 Summary 47
4 Modeling bathymetry 48
4.1 Introduction 48
4.2 Background information 48
4.3 Setting out the estuary
model 49
4.4 Defining the estuary 49
4.5 Modeling estuarine width 50
4.6 Modeling estuarine depth and
cross-section 53
4.7 Graphical display 55
4.8 Model validation 55

vi contents
Part III: Tides in Estuaries 59
5 Estuarine tides 61
5.1 Introduction 61
5.3 A brief history of tidal theory 62
5.4 Equilibrium theory of tides 63
5.5 Harmonic analysis of tides 66
5.6 Harmonic terms 67
5.7 Spring-neap variations 69
5.8 Tides in estuaries 70
5.9 Summary 73
6 Modeling tides 74
6.1 Introduction 74
6.3 Controlling tidal inputs 75
6.4 Modeling spring-neap
amplitudes 76
6.5 Modeling M4 amplitudes 77
6.6 Modeling the tidal wave 77
6.7 Graphical display of the
spring-neap cycle 78
Part IV: Currents in Estuaries 83
7 Estuarine currents 85
7.1 Introduction 85
7.3 Flow descriptors 86
7.4 The Reynolds experiment and
turbulence 86
7.5 The Reynolds, Froude, and
Richardson numbers 87
7.6 Estuarine mixing
parameters 89
7.7 Stratiﬁcation number, St 91
7.8 Progressive and standing
tidal waves 91
7.9 Discharge relationships 93
7.10 Summary 93
8 Modeling currents 95
8.1 Introduction 95
8.3 Modeling upstream volume
changes 96
8.4 Modeling the tidal flow 97
8.5 Modeling the freshwater
flow 97
8.6 Modeling the total flow 99
8.7 Graphical display of the
flow 99
Part V: The Temperature and
Salinity of Estuaries 103
9 Estuarine temperature and
salinity 105
9.1 Introduction 105
9.3 Temperature 106
9.4 Salinity 107
9.5 Advection and diffusion 108
9.6 The Gaussian distribution 109
9.7 Estuarine temperatures 109
9.8 Estuarine salinities 111
9.9 Summary 112
10 Modeling temperature and
salinity 114
10.3 Modeling a Gaussian process 115
10.4 The temperature
distribution 115
10.5 Displaying the temperature
distribution 117
10.6 The salinity distribution 117

contents vii
10.7 Displaying the salinity
distribution 122
Part VI: Suspended Particulate
Matter in Estuaries 123
11 Estuarine particulates 125
11.3 Erosion of particulates 126
11.4 Deposition of particulates 128
11.5 Equilibrium concentrations 131
11.6 The turbidity maximum 132
11.7 Intratidal forcing of SPM 135
11.8 Intertidal forcing of SPM 137
11.9 Seasonal forcing of SPM 137
11.10 Summary 140
12 Modeling particulates 141
12.3 Setting up particulates 142
12.4 Describing the turbidity
maximum 142
12.5 Calibrating the turbidity
maximum 143
12.6 Advecting the
distributions 145
12.7 Graphical display of
particulates 148
Bibliography 149
Index 155

PREFACE
This is the fourth book which the author has
written, or almost written, in the field of
environmental modeling. The first, which
was a “how to” book entitled Computerised
Environmental Modelling: A Practical Introduc-
tion with David Taylor and Sarah Metcalfe,
appeared in 1993 and was reprinted within
the year. Encouraged by this publishing suc-
cess, a contract was offered for a similar
“how to” book on beaches which I tried,
without success, to write in 1995. The book
was based upon an undergraduate course
(and vice versa), but the course was deemed
too difficult and the book drifted away. The
course evolved into the more general area of
coastal systems during 1996, and I tried to
write the new book about the new course,
but both book and course suffered from the
weight of University administration and a
number of difficult research projects. Finally,
by 1996 the Internet had properly arrived
and, with it, the possibility of using the
World Wide Web as a research tool. My
group engaged this exciting opportunity by
developing operational estuary models and
testing them with real time data on our
web site. The result was exciting science
and clearly of great practical interest to stu-
dents seeking real world experience and to
practitioners working in a wide range of
coastal disciplines. A new, graduate module
entitled “Estuaries: Monitoring, Modelling
and Management” was introduced. In 2004
this was delivered online for the first time
becoming simply “Estuaries” with stream-
ing video and .wav files. In many ways this,
the fourth draft but only the second to be
published, is the book of that course.
This book rather than any of the others
came to be written because of two com-
plementary demands. First, it is a research
monograph and arose out of work on
the Natural Environment Research Coun-
cil’s (NERC’s) Land Ocean Interaction Study
(LOIS) program. The British Government,
through its NERC, poured substantial invest-
ment into LOIS and many scientists from
many disciplines attempted to coordinate
their work toward a central research objec-
tive. This was the era of the “user commu-
nity” and the concept of “information” or
“decision support” systems gained consider-
able credibility within LOIS. Attempts were
made to build such systems and, above all,
Dr. Kevin Morris from the Plymouth Marine
Laboratory shared the author’s vision of
combining data with operational forecasts
(which, of course test our science) from
within and without LOIS, and thus the con-
cept of operational information systems was

x preface
born. This book attempts to incorporate both
the vision and the research results into the
systems that are described here.
Second, it is a graduate and professional
reference book and, in the United Kingdom
at least, there is never enough time to cover
all of the material which we would like in
a single module. More importantly, stu-
dents are always reluctant to pursue origi-
nal source material and would rather work,
quite reasonably, from a single unifying text.
With this book the students of the University
of Hull’s module “16450 Monitoring and
Modelling Estuarine Systems” will never
again be able to claim that they were unable
to locate the reading material. It is all here.
This is also a dynamic book with many
of the models, calculations, diagrams, and
internet references available and updated
through the book’s web site at
www.blackwellpublishing.com/hardisty
Finally, grateful thanks must be extended
to the very many people who have helped in
the development of the ideas described here
but, of course, the errors and omissions are
mine alone.
Jack Hardisty
Professor of Environmental Physics, The
University of Hull
j.hardisty@hull.ac.uk
Microsoft product screen shots reprinted with
permission from Microsoft Corporation.

ESTUARINE TOOLBOXES
Toolbox 1 Milankovitch Cycles Toolbox 9 Tidal Shear Stress
Toolbox 2 Estuarine Widths Toolbox 10 Threshold Velocity
Toolbox 3 Estuarine Depths Toolbox 11 Rate of Erosion
Toolbox 4 Spring-Neap Tides Toolbox 12 Stokes Law
Toolbox 5 Estuarine Tides Toolbox 13 Rate of Deposition
Toolbox 6 Normalized Gaussian Toolbox 14 Intratidal Erosion and
Distribution Deposition
Toolbox 7 Temperature Toolbox 15 Intratidal ETM
Toolbox 8 Salinity Toolbox 16 Intertidal ETM
The Estuarine Toolboxes are available from www.blackwellpublishing.com/hardisty

DYNAMIC INTERNET
REFERENCES
The following internet references were used for the images described. Updated internet
references, where appropriate, are available from www.blackwellpublishing.com/hardisty
DIR 1.1 The Humber Estuary: glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml
DIR 1.2 Eccentricity, tilt, and precession of the earth’s orbit: after
www.homepage.montana.edu/∼geol445/hyperglac
DIR 1.3 Precession, tilt, and eccentricity combine to force solar heating and result in
glacial advances and retreats: after en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
DIR 1.4 Sea-level curves for various sites around the United Kingdom: after
home. hiroshima-u.ac.jp/er/Resources/Image247.gif
DIR 1.5 Tides in the Humber Estuary for October 19, 2004 for (from top) Spurn Head,
Immingham, Humber Bridge, and Goole: from easytide.ukho.gov.uk/EasyTide
DIR 2.1 Tide pole at Anchorage, Alaska: from www.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/about2.html
DIR2.2 Deep water pressure transducer gauge: www.valeport.co.uk
DIR 2.3 Acoustic tide gauge installed at Settlement Point, Bahamas:
sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/invest-merrifield-fig2.htm
DIR 2.4 British Oceanographic Data Centre: www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/
DIR 2.5 NOAA’s Tides Online: tidesonline.nos.noaa.gov/geographic.html
DIR 2.6 ACCLAIM: www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/programmes/acclaim.info.html
DIR 2.7 Valeport Braystoke impellor flow meter: www.valport.co.uk
DIR 2.8 (a) Travel Time acoustic current meter and (b) Döppler shift acoustic current
meter: www.sontek.co
DIR 2.9 A range of electromagnetic current meters: www.valeport.co.uk
DIR 2.10 The North American PORTS system: co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/d_ports.html
DIR 2.11 Traditional oceanographic reversing thermometer:
www.photolib.noaa.gov/ships/ship3154.htm
DIR 2.12 Seabird Electronics oceanographic temperature sensor for use in estuarine waters:
www.seabird.com

xiv dynamic internet references
DIR 2.13 Hilgard’s Ocean Salinometer (c.1880):
www.photolib.noaa.gov/ships/ship0420.htm
DIR 2.14 University of Miami salinometer on board the Royal Caribbean cruise ship
Explorer of the Sea: www.rsmas.miami.edu/rccl/olab.html
DIR 2.15 Partech transmissometer for suspended solid monitoring: www.partech.co.uk:
and optical back scatter (OBS-3) device: www.d-a-instuments.com
DIR 2.16 Acoustic back scatter device: www.aquatec.demon.co.uk: and example of sus-
pended particulate concentration profilers obtained on the Californian continen-
tal shelf: www.oal.whoi.edu/images/abss.gif
DIR 2.17 Near-real-time data from the Canadian Humber River Newfoundland:
www.gov.nl.ca/wrmd/RTWQ/02YL003.asp
DIR 2.18 West Gabbard buoy in the southern North Sea is a Smart Buoy operated by
CEFAS: www.cefas.co.uk/wavenet/default.htm
DIR 3.1 Early Admiralty chart of the Dart Estuary, Devon in England:
www.ukho.gov.uk/ corp/History.asp
DIR 5.1 The generation of a single tide, here the M2 or S2 tide as a sinusoid resulting from
the rotation of the observer beneath the two gravitational bulges. (a) represents
the symmetrical tides generated by the Moon orbiting above the earth’s equator
whilst (b) represents the diurnal inequality due to an inclination of the orbit.
www.hydro.gov.uk/ttflash/webfiles/tidal1.htm
DIR 5.2 The original Kelvin and the later Doodson/Lege tide prediction machines:
www.hydro.gov.uk/ttflash/webfiles/tidal1d.htm
DIR 9.1 Global distribution of ocean surface temperatures:
www.fnmoc.navy.mil/products/OTIS/US058VMET-GIFwxg.OTIS.glbl_sst.gif

Part I
EVOLUTION AND
MONITORING
Estuaries: Monitoring and Modeling the Physical System
Jack Hardisty
Copyright © 2007 by Jack Hardisty

1
INTRODUCTION TO
ESTUARINE SYSTEMS
Contents
1.1 Introduction 3
1.2 Origins, climate, and ice
ages 5
1.3 Web site systems 5
1.4 Sea-level rise and estuaries 8
1.5 Bathymetry 13
1.6 Tides 15
1.7 Currents 15
1.8 Temperature and salinity 15
1.9 Particulates 18
1.10 Classification of
estuaries 18
1.1 Introduction
The term estuary is derived from the Latin
word “aestus” meaning tide and refers to a
tongue of the sea reaching inland. Estuaries
are formed by sea-level rise following a
glaciation or ice age (Woodroffe, 2003), and
represent the complex nonlinear interaction
of tides, currents, salt, water, and sedi-
ment. In this book, we attempt to combine
the latest theoretical and empirical results
to build and to test a new integrated and
transparent model which simulates these
estuarine processes. In this chapter we
examine the longer-term climate changes
which lead to the sea-level rise and estuarine
formation and describe the resulting, modern
estuarine processes and some estuarine
classiﬁcations.
There are a number of excellent text books
and journals dedicated to different aspects
of estuarine science and management. As
a general introduction, Brown (1999)
provides a readable, largely qualitative
description of estuarine processes.
Quantitative rigor is provided by Dyer’s
books (1986 and 1997) and specialist pub-
lications in the various disciplines cov-
ered here: oceanography, sedimentary
geology, meteorology, engineering, physical
geography, and the environmental sciences.
Estuaries: Monitoring and Modeling the Physical System
Jack Hardisty
Copyright © 2007 by Jack Hardisty

4 evolution and monitoring
FIGURE 1.1 Landsat image of the Humber Estuary from Spurn Head (in the east on the right of the image) to
the headwaters (in the west). Image cropped from a LANDSAT 7 satellite data file code p202r023_7t20010512
supplied by the Global Land Cover Facility, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. URL (DIR 1.1).
Although this book deals with a general-
ized, virtual estuary, it is based on research
work in the British Natural Environment
Research Council’s Land Ocean Interaction
Study (LOIS) on the author’s local waterway
called the Humber Estuary (Figure 1.1). The
Humber is ideal for these purposes. It has
a catchment of some 25,000 km2, with a
large tidal range and strong currents, and is
responsible for the interchange of millions
of tonnes of sediment with the North Sea
each year. The Humber also has great socio-
economic importance with a long history of
marine and maritime trade and traffic and
major port and petrochemical complexes. It
is also typical of the world’s estuaries in that
it is, in geological terms, young and dynamic
being a product of sea-level rise associated
with the retreat of ice following the last
global glaciation.
We begin with a qualitative model that
describes estuarine processes in five stages:
1 Bathymetry: A river mouth is flooded with
ocean water during sea-level rise after a
glacial period generating a basic three-
dimensional shape.
2 Tides: The ocean is tidal. At high tide, sea-
water flows into the river mouth making
the estuary more saline whilst at low
tide the water returns to the sea making
the estuary less saline.
3 Currents: The inflow, outflow, and mixing
of the ocean water with the land drainage
generates freshwater and tidal currents
within the estuary.
4 Temperature and salinity: The tidal
currents transport heat and salt around the
estuary through the processes of advection
and diffusion.
5 Particulates: Solid particles are also eroded,
transported, and deposited, so that the
bathymetry changes and in turn influ-
ences the tides, currents, and transport
processes.
The processes are sequentially detailed in
later sections of this book. For example,
the theory and modeling of estuarine
bathymetry is covered in Part II. Tides,

introduction to estuarine systems 5
currents, temperature and salinity, and
particulate matter are covered in Parts III,
IV, V, and VI respectively.
1.2 Origins, climate, and ice ages
The geological history of coastal and
estuarine environments is best understood
in terms of global evolution due to the
processes of plate tectonics and climate
change that have been continuing since
the planet first solidified some 4,600 myBP
(million years before present). Geologists
divide these vast intervals of time into
four distinct eras and into periods and
epochs as shown in Table 1.1. Archaeologists
have divided the Pleistocene and Holocene
Epochs into a series of ages, related to the
utilization of tools by mankind.
It is clear from the geological record that
there are more or less regular cycles in the
Earth’s climate within which colder condi-
tions lead to the onset of ice ages during
which sea-levels fall by tens to hundreds
of metres. Following amelioration and the
retreat of the ice, sea-level rises and the
associated marine transgressions flood river
valleys and form estuaries on a global scale.
It is also now clear that it is the rela-
tively increased solar radiation and summer
warming and melting of the ice associated
with these cycles which is one of the most
important driving mechanisms. The solar
radiation levels are, in turn, controlled by
the precession and tilt of the Earth’s axis and
the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit around the
Sun as shown in Figure 1.2. It is now known
that changes in these orbital parameters are
responsible for global climate change and,
in particular, for the advance and retreat
of a series of ice ages throughout geologi-
cal time and, ultimately, for the formation
of estuaries.
1 Precession is the Earth’s axis’ slow rotation
as it spins. This top-like wobble, or precession,
has a periodicity of about 23,000 years.
2 Tilt varies between about 21◦ and 24◦ over
a period of about 41,000 years and the direc-
tion changes over two cycles of 19,000 and
23,000 years. Today the Earth’s axial tilt is
about 23.5◦, which largely accounts for our
seasons. Because of the periodic variations of
this angle the severity of the Earth’s seasons
changes. With less axial tilt, the Sun’s solar
radiation is more evenly distributed between
winter and summer. Less tilt also increases
the difference in radiation receipts between
the equatorial and polar regions.
3 Eccentricity of the orbit varies over a period
of about 100,000 years. At present the
orbital eccentricity is nearly at the minimum
of its cycle with a difference of only about
3% between aphelion (farthest point) and
perihelion (closest point) so that Earth
receives about 6% more solar energy in
January than in July. When the Earth’s
orbit is most elliptical the amount of solar
energy received at the perihelion would
be in the range of 20–30% more than at
aphelion.
There have been eight large glacial buildups
over the past 800,000 years, each coincid-
ing with a minimum eccentricity (Figure 1.3)
and associated sea-level changes.
1.3 Web site systems
This book is supported by a series of
web pages accessed through the publisher’s
site at www.blackwellpublishing.com/
hardisty where three groups of tools may
be accessed:
1 Dynamic Internet References. There are
a number of online references throughout
this book to Internet sites, which are kept
up to date with Dynamic Internet References

6 evolution and monitoring
TABLE 1.1 The divisions of geological time.
Eras Periods Epochs Ages
Cenozoic 63 myBP Quaternary 2 myBP Holocene 10,000 BP Roman 43 AD
Iron 600 BC
Late, middle and early
Bronze 2000 BC
Late, middle and early
Neolithic (New Stone)
3,500 BC late and early
Mesolithic 10,000 BC
Late middle and early
Pleistocene Paleolithic 1,000,000
(1 my) Upper, middle
and lower
Neogene 26 myBP Pliocene
Miocene
Palaeogene 63 myBP Oligocene
Mesozoic 225 myBP Eocene
Palaeocene
Cretaceous 136 myBP Land epoch in Britain
and transgression
South America separates
from South Africa
Jurassic 195 myBP Downwarping in
Britain initiation of
North Atlantic
Triassic 225 myBP Erosion, infilling, and
marine transgression
Paleozoic 570 myBP Permian 280 myBP Pennine uplift and
lowering of sea-level
Carboniferous
345 myBP
Marine transgression
and complex elevation.
Devonian 410 myBP Folding, warping, and
local sedimentations
Silurian 440 myBP Final infilling of the
Caledonian basins
Ordovician 530 myBP Folding,
downwarping, and
metamorphism
Cambrian 570 myBP Seafloor spreading
and sedimentation
Pre-Cambrian Lewisian and
Torridonian rocks of
northwest Scotland
date from
Pre-Cambrian times
From 4,600 myBP
All dates mark the lower boundary of the interval.

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Quiet,” etc.

Angelo Bastiani. By Lionel Cust. Illustrated by Frank Mason.
Magnus Sinclair. A Border Historical Novel. By Howard Pease.
A. CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd. LONDON
PATHS OF JUDGEMENT
By
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(Author of “The Rescue” “The Confounding of Camelia” etc)
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO Ltd
1904
Butler & Tanner,
The Selwood Printing Works.
Frome, and London.
PART I
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV,
XVI, XVII.
PART II
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV

M
PART I
CHAPTER I
RS. CUTHBERT MERRICK, erect in her shining dogcart, watched
the stout pony’s indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance.
The road was steep and the day hot.
Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from
gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across
the dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime
and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.
Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the
wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy of
her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the hill-top was a
grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and trees of an orderly
dulness, that didn’t even make Constable effects, to look at, below there,
about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes resolutely from the
unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and a minute’s quick trot
brought her to her destination.
Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond
the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the south-
western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant summer
woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the house,
though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with contented
serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the beech-woods, the
rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon the other to the
splendid line of the horizon.
So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the half-
clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers about it. The
independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. Merrick thought, as
she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, too large for a cottage,
too classic, with its pillared door-way and balanced proportions, for its
diminutiveness. It made one think of a tiny Greek temple incongruously

placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it symbolized an attitude that had always
bewildered and irritated her. The garden, too, irritated her and made her
envious. Even at this late summer season its beauty was abundant. Her
well-trained gardener at Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him,
produced no such effects with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was
like an official report; this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the
simile; she merely felt, as before, irritating comparisons.
Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying
into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes were
Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the shade a soft
radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of white pansies,
thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the ground; near them
nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour against the wall.
As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden, a
girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the
house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but
loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at once
flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon at her
neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew and
dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down her
burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple and
white and flame; smiling indifferently.
Mrs. Merrick’s smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative.
She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted her.
Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply tonged fringe
and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed appendages of the
sailor hat—tilted forward and fastened to her head by a broad elastic band,
a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could but sit erect; her meagre
body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was box-like. Her figure was her chief
vanity; its “neatness” her aim, and the word with her signified a careful,
unrelaxing compression.
“Gardening, Felicia?” she asked, glancing down at her niece’s earth-
dogged shoes.
Felicia Merrick’s father and her own husband were brothers.
“Yes; digging all morning; weeding and watering most of the afternoon.”
Felicia was thinking that to-day her aunt looked more funnily than ever like

a collection of parcels strapped together for postal delivery. She was
mentally tying a stamped label to her hat; the circle of the curl between the
eyebrows was already a post-mark.
“Doesn’t Thomas do the digging? It must, I know, be hard to manage
with one boy, but surely he could do the digging.”
“He does, unless I want to.”
“People can see you from the road—not that any one passes by here
often.”
“Not often,” Felicia assented.
“I want to know if you can come down to us to-morrow for a week,”
said Mrs. Merrick, allowing the antagonistic moment to pass, and after a
slight hesitation Felicia answered, “Yes, thanks.”
Mrs. Merrick had often suspected that Felicia’s gratitude on these
occasions was not up to the mark of the opportunities they gave her, and
now, emphasizing the present opportunity, she went on, “You can’t fail to
enjoy yourself. Lady Angela Bagley is with us. You have heard of her. I met
her in London this Spring; we took a great fancy to each other. She is a
wonderful woman—really wonderful. Such intellect, such soul, such world
polish, and with it such saintliness. Everybody feels that about her; it helps
one to know that there are such people in the world,” said Mrs. Merrick,
sighing as she flicked the pony—“people who have everything the world
can give, and who care nothing for it.” Felicia wondered from which of her
recent guests her aunt had picked up these phrases which came oddly from
her anxious materialism.
“I have often seen her picture in the ladies’ papers,” she replied; “it will
be nice to see her.” She dimly remembered a narrow face, a mist of hair, a
long, yearning throat, and she at once decided that she would not like Lady
Angela and her soul.
“Yes, it will be nice for you. She takes an interest in everybody. Of
course your father must come, too. There are some interesting men whom
he will like meeting. Mr. Daunt, the young M.P., is a cousin of Lady Angela
—the comet of the season, my dear;—most wonderful speech in the House
—you probably heard of it; Imperialism—national prestige;—and a friend
of his, Mr. Wynne, a most captivating person. He writes essays, he paints,
he plays the violin; people are quite mad about him in London. You mustn’t
fall in love with him, Felicia, for, charming as he is, he has no money.”

Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened stone
with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest.
“And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure,
will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in books, I
suppose. Is he writing?”
“Yes. He is well.”
“He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr.
Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it last
night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now.”
Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing.
“So,” Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly—her niece had the faculty of
disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs—“So it will be
nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I
thought that he would see or hear me.”
Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his
hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the afternoon’s
balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his sister-in-law, had lured
him from his studies.
He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome
head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair haloed
a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely aquiline, the lips
full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing of his own impressions; his
cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous. Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering
green neck-tie, a Panama hat, placed at the back of his head with a certain
recklessness, carried out the impression of ease and of indifference.
“Ah! Kate,” he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large,
white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively
away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick irritably
wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.
“You and Felicia are coming to me for a week,” she said, again flicking
her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. “I mustn’t let you get rusty
up here.”
If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had an
equal faculty for “drawing” her father. His eye did not turn from the
landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, “Ah, my

dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my good
little whetstone here I don’t fancy that the combined efforts of our not
highly intelligent country people could save me from it—when I go among
them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in spite of
one’s resolve to keep one’s steel bright. Up here we have our own little
space of dry, bracing air—we keep one another sharpened, don’t we,
Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find, when we
come down from our tiny Parnassus.”
Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm
around his daughter’s shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness of
the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight smile
seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while disavowing its
magnificent complacency.
Mrs. Merrick’s sudden flush made evident her nose’s amelioration. “It is
well to have the gift of idealization, Austin—it makes life far more
comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?” The
irony of her tone was not easy.
“One moment, Kate.” Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter’s
shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. “Do you see that quite
delightful effect—that group of trees melting against the sky—“ It was to
Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom Mrs. Merrick
had never heard. “He could do it; it’s like one of his smiling bits.” His eye
still dwelt upon it as he said, “I am rather busy just now, Kate. I have a
great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a rather obscure phase of that
most obscure thing—German idealism; what caves they creep into, poor
fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, the unpleasant sun;—I can’t
leave just now.”
“But a holiday would do you good.” Mrs. Merrick was forced to some
urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to feel
that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these sourly suave
contests without being made to feel that she was receiving one. Indeed, her
odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude, his disdain, and his
pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure she could not afford to
miss from her parties—parties often so painfully scraped together—
painfully commonplace when scraped. This year her party was surprisingly
significant, but even in its midst Austin would count well as her appendage

—would certainly redeem her from her husband’s heavy conformity, that
simply counted for nothing. He impressed her, and she imagined that he
must impress other people.
“I have a really interesting group,” she said, and she recited the list,
adding, “Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so
suggestive—“ Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of
consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia.
“Jones? Ah, yes,” Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity.
“A clever man, you know.”
“Not bad,” Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity.
“That little book of his on Comte wasn’t half bad; you remember it,
Felicia?”
Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added
discomfiture. “You will come, then?” She gathered up her reins.
“May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but
may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow,
and I will join you as soon as may be.” His face had regained its full
serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession.
When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her
digging. Her father stood in the path watching her.
“Could one of Spenser’s heroines be imagined digging?” he mused.
“The day, the flowers—you among them—bring Spenser to my mind.”
“I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand
to do,” said Felicia. “But I am not a Britomart type.”
“And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;—an indolent, unroused
Britomart. But I don’t see you in armour. Charming, that white dress
drenched with sunlight.”
“And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose
we must go to her? Aren’t you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her
parties?”
“My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial
isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And then”—
Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply—“it is well that you
should have these distractions.”

“How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?”
Felicia remarked.
“A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may
find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate managed to
get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a very clever
fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite extraordinary
independence.”
“What is he?—a Liberal?”
“Really, my dear Felicia—your ignorance of politics!” Her father
laughed, half approving the indifference to the world’s loud drums such
ignorance betokened. “Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is on
the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the
Admiralty.”
“Personally ambitious, do you mean?”
“When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?” Mr.
Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but
delicate hand through his hair. “Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if need
be, is no longer to be found in British public life.”
Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be
addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague
attention. “He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly success,
and bound to succeed, is clever. It’s a cloddish cleverness, after all. This
Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I’ve read a little volume
of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle, ironic; bound by no outworn
faiths and making use of none for his own advancement; an observer
merely, not a scrambler.”
Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, “Scrambling must be nice, I
should think.”
She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had
walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she worked; it
was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that recognized and
accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her father made her wince
when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the world!
The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as
her thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she had
burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now, it

O
was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of past
energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality of life go
by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what avail was
the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for armed faiths?
She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses strayed by. But
though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart attitude as sadly
funny, her hand had not slackened—she still held her sword. If a lion did
come, so much the better for her—and for life.
CHAPTER II
NLY one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that
afternoon—the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little
Gothic church—where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never
went, and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate
and derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia saw
every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely perhaps,
for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely decorous well-being of
the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her, wings that would fly to risks, a
faith that could be won only by fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most
things, she found it every morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the
symbol that rejected her.
Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than
those of their formal intercourse. He wasn’t at all a jackass, and he probably
thought her father one, and as Felicia’s place was beside her father the
barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and
smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous
daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin
Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr.
Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his defiant infidelity; he would have
cheerfully waived the relationship of parson for that of mere neighbour; and
he did not ask Mr. Merrick to listen to his sermons; he knew that they were
poor; he counted for more as man than as parson; but the personality of this
recalcitrant, wandering sheep, his vanity and patronizing superiority of
manner made even a neighbourly tolerance difficult. It was with an
impersonal courtesy that he bowed to Mr. Merrick’s daughter as he rode by.

Soon after Felicia went in to give her father his tea. He was sitting in the
small room that was, at once, library and drawing-room. Above book-filled
shelves the walls were whitewashed, and against this background tall
porcelains and bronzes showed their delicate outlines, and some fine
mezzotints after Reynolds and Gainsborough their harmonies of golden-
greys and blacks. In a corner stood an ivory-coloured cast of the Flying
Victory of Samothrace, and above it the thoughtful bust of Marcus Aurelius
looked down upon its arrested swiftness, its still and glorious strength.
From open windows, where white curtains flapped softly, one looked over
the garden and pinewoods and valleys to the sky of luminous gold.
One note, only, jarred; a charcoal drawing of a woman’s head, hung
prominently. Feebly ill-drawn, its over life-size exaggerated its absurdity;
the eyes monstrously large, not well matched, all beaming high light and
sentimental eyelash; the nose and mouth showing a rigid, a cloying
sweetness. This production was the result of one of Mr. Merrick’s rare fits
of active self-expression, and, excellent judge of art though he was, he was
completely blind to the grotesqueness of the caricature of his dead wife. He
had drawn it, many years ago, from life, and claimed to see in it a subtle
and exquisite likeness. Felicia suffered, though with the silent and
humorous resignation characteristic of her, from living with it, even when a
photograph of her mother, standing near, corrected its travesty of her
charming countenance.
Mr. Merrick was sitting in a deep armchair, his attitude of complete ease
harmonizing with the tranquil room, though his eyes, as he looked up from
the review he was reading, were irate. “The modern recrudescence of
mysticism is truly disheartening, Felicia,” he said. “Have you read this
article?”
Felicia, on her way to the tea-table, glanced at the title he held out, and
nodded.
“How long will the human race, like an ostrich, hide its head from truth
and, in the darkness, find revelation?”
“Why shouldn’t they make themselves comfortable in any way they
can?” Felicia asked, measuring her tea into the teapot.
“Comfort at the cost of truth is a despicable immorality.”
“Well—what is truth? How is the poor ostrich to find it out? Besides,
papa, you are comfortable, and the truths you believe in aren’t.” Her smile

at him was one of the comforts Mr. Merrick most securely counted on.
Felicia, in every way, made him comfortable, even when she argued with
him, and by half-droll opposition called out his refutations.
“My dear child,” he now said, “your logic is truly feminine. I have never
shirked an intellectual consequence. If, for the moment, I enjoy certain
satisfactions, I never forget that my position is that of the condemned
prisoner.”
“We certainly have a nicely furnished cell.”
“Your mind evades the realities of the bars,” said Mr. Merrick, selecting,
after a hesitation in the choice, a cake from the plate she handed him. “Once
you have seen an ugly fact you turn your back upon it.”
“What better thing can one do with an ugly fact? What claim has truth or
logic upon anybody in a world of atoms and their concussions? The only
thing to do is to make oneself comfortable—with tea or mysticism as the
case may be.”
Mr. Merrick received this flippancy with calm, convinced of an essential
chime under superficial janglings. “You are, I am glad to say, Felicia, a
woman who can think.”
“We do a lot of thinking,” Felicia assented. “How little else!” she could
not repress. That her thinking had been for the most part lonely she was
glad that her father never suspected, nor did he suspect a Puck-like fun she
found in turning his own theories against him. He ate slowly now, his eyes
raised in a train of thought that even his intelligent daughter, he felt, could
hardly have followed. His own detachment from the shows of life was its
theme. Suddenly, however, this contemplation was shaken by a more
intimate, more stirring realization. “My dear Felicia,” he exclaimed,
glancing rapidly at the tea-table and at the stand of eatables, “is not this the
day for the frosted cake?”
“Grant forgot it, papa; you shall have it to-morrow.”
“There are only the small cakes, then?”
“And bread and butter.”
“It is really very careless of Grant, very careless. She should not have
forgotten,” said Mr. Merrick, flushed, and as seriously aggrieved as a child.
“Pray, speak sharply to her about it. I looked forward to the frosted cake to-

A
day, freshly baked, warm, as I like it. It is very annoying. You are sure that
she has not made it?”
“Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it.” Felicia looked at him with
a touch of placid severity. “Have another of the small ones.”
“No—no, I thank you. I don’t care for them.” He had eaten three. The
distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful and
unexpected hors d’œuvre at dinner effaced the grievance. It was with a
species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these cajoleries,
herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he smoked, and
she read Leopardi aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite forgotten.
When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a
melancholy current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her
window looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply.
Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of theory, how
weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful it would be
—she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of thought—to love, to be
loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance, this awakening.
Felicia’s ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and
pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as gracious
and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in beauty over the
pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear, analyzing the feminine
waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that she was really ready to fall in
love with the first nice person who presented himself for idealization. He
must, of course, be possible; idealization had been impossible with the
stupid men she had met at Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs
and rabbit head. He must be possible—he must be delightful; and would he
ever come? “Beware, Felicia,” she thought. “You are young; you are lonely;
you are sentimental and idle; that’s a basis for mistakes and tragedies.” She
laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the yearning,
all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and the sky,
found an echo in her untried heart.
CHAPTER III
USTIN MERRICK had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of
an unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a

younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even
anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was helpless,
and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He had loitered
through college, fitting himself for no career, talking vaguely of a literary
life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was still pursuing it, very
placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the contrary, by the fact that his
pursuit implied that other people’s apparent attainments rested on a highly
illusory basis. Austin Merrick’s attitude had always been what it now was—
a calm down-smiling from a hill-top upon other people’s dulness.
After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser
reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism—the one book, as
sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date—Austin married a
pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune.
Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of
a sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she seized
upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to see life.
She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life
steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained; she was
fearless, eager, full of faith.
Austin Merrick met her at a Paris pension and his essentially irresolute
soul was stirred by Miss Grey’s resolute eyes, eyes large and clear, like a
boy’s. He stayed on at the pension and made Miss Grey’s acquaintance, an
easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or of formalities, and
regarded all individuals as offering deeply interesting experiences. The aunt
sat reading Flaubert, with a dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty
dimly alarming, and refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece
went sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey
described in home letters as “very cultivated and high-minded,” adding that
she imagined him to belong to an “aristocratic family.”
Felicia Grey’s crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize;
he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute
impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent to
conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world’s weights and
measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but
indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant
valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be.

With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic
about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,—these words
with capital letters—that he already felt it to be the fashion to scoff at a
little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest scorn—were burning
realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in love with her, he did not
dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had not much sense of humour,
and did not understand subtle scorns. He was in love, glorying in the
abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely unaware that had Miss Grey
not been modestly equipped with dollars he would not so have abandoned
himself. It was, indeed, a very modest equipment, but with his own tiny
allowance, that didn’t do at all—he was always in debt—would lift him
above the material restrictions that had so long irked him. His indifference
might really, then, equal hers.
He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the
reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking contemplatively
of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, and of making her
own living by teaching. “It seems to me that one would face life more
directly—more truly—like that,” remarked Miss Grey.
He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days
argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its
responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she was
the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of life, took
people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr. Merrick very
“cultivated and high-minded”; she equipped him further with a “great soul,”
and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him, too, very beautiful in
his wise persuasiveness.
He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be lived
with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life should be
lived with him.
So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her
husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to
Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather
pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed
fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.
She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great
meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like

routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull country-side, but
her husband’s character. She never doubted the great soul, but she never
seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; he thought her perfect,
as he thought all his possessions; she did not know that it was her echo of
his imaginary self that he prized, that she was the living surety of his own
worth, never felt that the key-note of his character was an agile vanity that
sprang to defend him from any attack that might mean self-revelation. He
was always clever enough to see her worth, but not clever enough to see
that her intelligence grew blurred and groping when it turned its light upon
the objects of her affection.
Her husband’s idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it,
or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its pompous
premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than the lives of
any of the neighbouring squires—if as much. What did she and Austin do in
the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like question.
She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick’s mind was a
lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be
surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive criticism, he
found the attitude of superiority more attainable by opposition. He did most
of his thinking in youth, when the current of scientific agnosticism caught
him; he had gone with it, not helping it in any way, merely borne along, and
he had gone no farther than it had gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of
its once flowing tide, unable to follow it into deepened channels. His mental
development had stopped at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of
natural law and the ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr.
Merrick had not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The
largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a lazy
lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant optimism
he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his own nature.
He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for him, of being
twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty ahead of that of
his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a looming, half-
ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of a vigorous
clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did not even
remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But with all his
complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick was intelligent,
dependent and affectionate, soured only by indifference, angered only by

M
ridicule, and his wife in her relation to him knew nothing worse than that
abiding sense of perplexity. She saw with difficulty the ironic side of life;
the deepest draught of bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that
life was tragic. Her small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque
as well as tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her
with a radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young
girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick
braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head, looked
hardly more than twenty when she died.
Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness,
with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had
never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender, very
loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the uprearing of
her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due to a child, the
Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia remembered the naïvely
sententious aphorisms with which she armed her. “In this life to fail is to
triumph,” was one, and the pathos to Felicia was in seeing that the aphorism
was an unrealized truth in her mother’s own life. She had indeed “carried
her soul like a white bird,” through the painful deserts of disillusion, a
disillusion that only her daughter apprehended.
She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also
ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did not
trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she thought
him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more foolish than
he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for lions, and her only
title to commendation in her own eyes was that she, at all events, did not
bray.
CHAPTER IV
RS. MERRICK sent a cart for her niece’s box next morning, and
Felicia set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome
Hall, happy in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded
easily to sunshine and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education,
easily expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for
her behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more
potent mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk,

smiling, behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia’s mood was happy. She
saw it in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled
woods, in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-
like song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the
warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was only
an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the road, she
met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the breeziness,
the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming thus upon each
other, both smiling to themselves, both looking, listening, and, as it were,
expectant, it seemed only natural that their eyes should dwell upon each
other with frank interest. Their steps slackened, a mute, pleased query
passed between them, and the young man, doffing his hat, and giving
Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of sunlit auburn hair, said, “I beg
your pardon, but I am sure that you are Miss Merrick.”
“And you are Mr. Wynne,” said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was
not the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as
natural as all the rest.
“I came to meet you,” said Mr. Wynne. “I heard that you were arriving
this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful
garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to meet you
as near them as possible.”
Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss
Merrick.
Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white
roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair—hair the
colour of sandal-wood—and her pale face. He would have climbed any
number of hills to see the face—so significant, so resolute, so delicate.
Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her
wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her eye-
brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet vivid tints of
her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her eyelashes slanted across
them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland water. Maurice was seeing
all this, delightedly,—and that through the child-like moulding of the cheek,
the lips’ sweetness, the eyes’ tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous
gaiety—a dryad laughing a little at her own new soul.

“You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me,” said Felicia,
“unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to them
——“
“Perhaps you will show me both on some other day,” said Maurice,
“since I haven’t missed you.” He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia,
also making inner comments, reflected that a person so assured of his own
graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His looks, his
words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the bird still sang
on behind them.
“It isn’t in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is
unusual.”
“I am sure that your garden is unusual—just as this first stage of my
journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure in a
Watteau landscape.”
“If you had started a little earlier,” Felicia said, smiling, “and met me on
the hill-side, I shouldn’t have been so in harmony. There the pine-woods are
very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been incongruous.”
“Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual,” he returned; “there
would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I may
tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in the shadow
and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite bewilderingly
radiant and charming?”
Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say it,
so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once
more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed as
inevitable as the bird’s song. She could hardly feel that his rights were only
those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he would like, and a
person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, if he would, he might
say that she was like a Watteau and had made a picture. She had
experienced, for her part, something of the same sensation. Maurice had
been a radiant and delightful apparition.
He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made.
Hair, small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his
lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink and
white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had not their
blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, his smile,

claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response and
understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of sparkling
emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He was so much
an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to have walked
with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale—into a veritable Watteau
landscape, at all events, where happiness was the only natural thing in the
world.
As they approached the lodge-gates—they had been talking without
pause of music, books, pictures, even about life—he asked her how she had
guessed that he was Maurice Wynne—“Because there is only one of you—
but there are several of us—Mrs. Merrick’s guests, I mean.”
“She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one
of them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the
other.”
“Poor Geoffrey!” Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, “how you have
guessed at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is
a tremendous friend of mine.”
“Is he? I hope you don’t mind my flippancy; it was founded on the
merest scrap of conjecture.”
“It isn’t flippancy; it’s intuition. Geoffrey is that, only he is more. I don’t
mind a bit—I wouldn’t mind flippancy, only I feel bound to testify.
Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been since our boyhood.”
His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of character than his
charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool approval to the
stately friend.
“I suppose you have heard about the others, too,” Maurice went on;
“Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will
strike you. You must tell me—even if it’s flippant. She is clever, too; at all
events, she is very effective.”
“Do you think they are the same thing?”
“Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn’t it?”
“If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect them, I
suppose.”
“But if they are stupid?” smiled Maurice, “and such heaps of people are,
aren’t they?”

M
“Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants out
of their stupidity.”
“Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does,” said Maurice. It was what she
had imagined of him. “And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly thing,”
he added.
“Oh; I don’t know.” Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were
going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. “It would
depend, wouldn’t it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?”
“He wants to get power.”
“Well, there again, for what end?”
“Isn’t power an end in itself?”
“I should think it ought to have an aim.”
“Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that sort
of thing?”
“It is the part of the powerful person to say that.”
Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. “You won’t like Geoffrey,”
he observed. “But though he hasn’t ideals I will say of him that he is dear of
the usual reproach of the politician—he claims none. Now Lady Angela
does,” he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that rather alarming
sense of sudden intimacy. “She lives under tremendously high pressure, you
know.” They had passed down the uninteresting avenue, its trees marking
sections of flat, green country, and as the house was reached Felicia felt the
moment deferred for learning more precisely in what this pressure
consisted.
CHAPTER V
RS. MERRICK’S drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions.
Such intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle
Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of Art
Nouveau. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs
weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an
obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of
painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed
like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick’s painfully acquired taste had not had

the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no eliminations,
and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.
She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and
shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, always
felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever apparent,
perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs. Merrick
gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup of tea, and
left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she herself turned her
quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her tea-cup, Felicia went
across the room to a solitary seat under the tallest palm, amused as usual by
her own contrast to the tropics above her and the upholstered respectability
beneath. She put her cup on a small and intricately hideous table,
perforated, heavily inlaid, with distorted bandy legs—a table, Felicia
thought, that seemed to totter up to one, winking and leering with all its
decorations—and drawing off her gloves, she looked about her, interested
in the latest turn of her aunt’s kaleidoscope.
Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her
adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before he
had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a young man
of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not arrogant, showing,
as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm vacancy; but his profile was
arrogantly perfect. One sought face and figure in vain for some humanizing
defect, some deviation from Olympian completeness. He had the air, radiant
and inflexible, of a sun-god. His height, too, was Olympian; his legs,
terminating in long, slender shoes, were stretched out before him to quite a
startling distance. Felicia’s quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing
hostile in this young man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her
genial maliciousness found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a
right to be so magnificent.
An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr.
Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a corner
from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty hangings
and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession. The presence
among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and Lady Angela
were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that. Mr. Daunt amused
her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.

She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid man—
Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him—and in appearance she was very long and
curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the swathing
lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a shadow
across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her; clasps of
turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that curved among
the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward the melancholy
smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale, shadowed to mysterious
depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair haloed a narrow face and a
long throat, the face so narrow that all the delicate features looked
disproportionately large. There was an almost spectre-like effect in this
emphasis of the means of expression and the meagreness of setting, and the
expression itself, thought Felicia, was like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A
“touched-up” spectre. Lady Angela certainly did not please—nor amuse her
either. Their eyes met more than once while she drank her tea, and each
time Lady Angela’s seemed to rest on hers with a more insistent, more
gentle pathos; they almost seemed to be consoling her for her isolation in a
roomful of strangers, yet making her more conscious of isolation. It was
with a sense of quick relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she
saw Maurice Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of
sandwiches in the other.
“You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my
opportunity to bring you something.” His eyes smiling steadily, as if over
the new bond they had found, said to her, “You don’t like your aunt—nor
do I. You are out of your milieu here. Nobody here is capable of
appreciating you; but I appreciate you.” The smile was so infinitely more
delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity in her, only made her
happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost comrade.
As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt’s head turned towards them,
and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as
though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received a
more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He was
displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela, and
displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so freshly
young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until he presently
got up and went across the room to Lady Angela, interrupting her tête-à-tête

with such an air of evident purpose that Mr. Jones arose and wandered
away.
Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. “What have you been doing this
afternoon?” he asked.
From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his
eyes were upon them as he spoke.
“Writing to my friends,” Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a
great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate
recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was a
probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her time,
after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the same opinion.
That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her
significance was shown by his next placid question, “What about?”—quite
implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting to him.
Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be
understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an
intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, “About how I
feel life—theirs and mine.”
“You feel a good many things about it—don’t you?” Geoffrey smiled,
though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and
kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, “I
believe in feeling,” she returned.
“You and Maurice are alike in that.”
“Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an end;
mine is a means.”
“For the good of others?” Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a
perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not
imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one thing, but
to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble Hermes is gently
quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it was one that Geoffrey
often gave her. He was one of the few people, she told herself, who almost
made her angry. She flushed now, ever so slightly, at the tone. Yet with a
sweet patience that he should have felt as the turning of the other cheek, she
answered, “I own that I try to live for others.”

“And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he
is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference.”
Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at her
wrist.
“You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;—wilful, isn’t it?—
perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain attitudes make
misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts it.”
“Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?” Geoffrey inquired, raising his
eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the palm-
tree. “I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for others is
unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so.”
“I have owned to an aim—not to an attainment. Why is it that those who
do not aim cannot forgive those who do?—try always to smirch the effort in
the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not self-righteous, Geoffrey
—I frankly recognize your intimation—why not make it as frankly?”
Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all
abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very
lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before him.
Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, “I am sure that you
are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are very good. I
confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you a little.”
“It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you were to
sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is more
maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is strong,
though I myself am weak.”
Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to
observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it was
now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and his
abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind
turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but
flattering. “Who is that girl?” he inquired.
Angela’s eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that
Geoffrey’s interest in her, his relative, was only because of his interest in
Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some years had seemed
so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as the quite disastrously
bad match for her, was merely regarded by Geoffrey as the good match for

Maurice. Angela had always hoped that Geoffrey saw the delay in final
measures as caused by her own hesitation; and that at times he had tried to
urge her to a decision, she had fancied more than once, and always with a
soothing sense of sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation,
then, could not be Maurice’s, although to her weariness it so often seemed
Maurice’s indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking
now at the girl under the palm—the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned
the talk to—she said vaguely, “A niece—a cousin—I forget which Mrs.
Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the world—the
world to her. Quaint, isn’t it?”
“I shouldn’t like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick’s,” Geoffrey
observed. “An ugly woman,” he went on, adding, “The niece doesn’t look
provincial.”
“No; oddly she doesn’t; not physically; but provincial in soul I should
think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a shallow
joy in life. It hasn’t suffered, isn’t capable of much suffering. She looks like
a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive, alluring.”
Geoffrey passed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it was
natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was clearly
allured.
“Her dress isn’t provincial either,” he said; “its simplicity is extremely
sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods. She is a
young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress.”
“And how to eat,” mused Angela. “Dear child, it’s really delightful to see
such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich.”
“I beg your pardon, it is her fifth.”
“You share Maurice’s interest.”
“Is Maurice so interested?”
“Isn’t he?”
“While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a
sketch of her.”
Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it
with, “Why did you come here, Geoffrey?”
“Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a
quiet place where one can rest.”

G
“And why did Maurice come?”
Geoffrey responded promptly. “To see you—in a quiet place where he
can see you.”
She let the assertion pass, forestalling a possible retort with—
“And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of
Mrs. Merrick.”
“Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?”
“Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or
sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is interested
in many of my objects. She is trying to grow.”
“And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring
something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and thorny.”
“Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She made
me feel that, and I never refuse help.”
Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely
playful.
“Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship’s sake,” he
said, “rather than for Mrs. Merrick’s.” And Angela was unable to repress an
assenting though superficial lightness.
CHAPTER VI
EOFFREY and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father
and his mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III,
was an obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy
inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an heiress of
good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her greater
intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under the wife’s
guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate, a seat in
Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the Government’s
disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed and bullied his
way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted in the extremest
forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were at all veracious.
Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in
London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters all

well-married, inherited the father’s heavy determination, the mother’s
nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned the edifice
raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took their place among the
more tawdry great names of England. They never distinguished the name,
and after the first swift climb aspired to no further heights. They were
wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what they had, and held it firmly.
Angela’s father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be
said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and sentimental.
She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open rupture; flirted
with anybody of any importance to the verge of open scandal, and written a
flimsy political novel interesting only from its thinly veiled personalities;
she long posed as the typical femme incomprise, and just before her death
she became fervently religious.
Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as
possible, finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own
sublimities. She could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her
mother’s character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.
Geoffrey’s strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no
such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and
connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder
branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against all
manner of restrictions.
The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his
wife’s tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success
from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley blood,
possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal forms. The
strain, in passing through the two or three generations of simple and
dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears, had run itself
dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as proud as she was
eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She lived first in the
hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high places, and when, with not
unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity for self-advancement, she
transferred her passionate and patient hopes to her son. For him she saved,
slaved and battled. Geoffrey never learned, until shortly after his father’s
death, that his own opportunities were won not only by his mother’s
battlings, but by his father’s martyrdom.

John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in a
time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, had
deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian ethics
with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he belonged to.
With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her
amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of
questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them—
they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that one accepted as one
accepted the other probably irrational bases of life. He bowed before her
scorn of his weakness; but he was not prepared for her absolute refusal to
further his intention of leaving the Church.
How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that.
His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities. His
wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put
before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he
would find something to do.
“Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we
will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?” Mrs. Daunt’s eyes flashed fire as
she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the University,
the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their child, then?
The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept on: He,
forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of ten
times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience
and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she
turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had
looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his
people for him; the light he held up among them;—what difference did the
lamp make that held the flame?—the wrecking of others’ faiths involved in
his abandonment of a leaking ship—she would not say that it did leak; but
if it did, was it the place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not
see through the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to
her; yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the
flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.
Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father’s death, told her son of the spiritual
crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender
towards her husband’s memory, in the strength that had saved them all from
his weakness.

Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. “It shouldn’t
have happened had I known,” he said; “I could have made my way.”
“Made your way, my dear child!” cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment,
and yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. “Do your realize, I
wonder, what it cost us to make you?—cost me, rather, for I did it all. Do
you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every stick
and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, but it
would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from determines
the height one attains.”
“No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken
longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible,” said Geoffrey.
He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for
he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he
regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done
an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.
Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but
when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered
Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it was
the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of it,
poisoned all her happiness.
Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more firmly,
seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she never
recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her
energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was with a dim
yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the rapacities only.
Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.
The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela
could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further
than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.
Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his
sentiments towards this significant young relative, “I don’t like her. She is
an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn’t ask her here any more.”
Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome
this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela’s fortune to back him,
Geoffrey’s career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive seemed
forthcoming.

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