The
father believed in civilization, in the storied tower we have
erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed in Man.
The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger. They neither
of them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.
The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people
the impression--the somewhat irritating impression--produced by
such a person; it can only be described as the sense of strong
water being perpetually poured into some abyss. She did her
housework easily; she achieved her social relations sweetly; she
was never neglectful and never unkind. This accounted for all
that was soft in her, but not for all that was hard. She trod
firmly as if going somewhere; she flung her face back as if
defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yet there was
often battle in her eyes. The modern man asked doubtfully where
all this silent energy went to. He would have stared still more
doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.
The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a
compromise or confusion between those of France and England; and
it was vaguely possible for a respectable young lady to have
half-attached lovers, in a way that would be impossible to the
_bourgeoisie_ of France. One man in particular had made himself
an unmistakable figure in the track of this girl as she went to
church. He was a short, prosperous-looking man, whose long, bushy
black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem both shorter
and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, and step
that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.
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