Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/130

118 granted that we should hear no more of these nuptials, in which I now recognized an element incongruous from the first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The charm was some material charm, some affinity, exquisite doubtless, yet superficial; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each other's souls? How could they have the same prejudices; how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered, when, one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found our young lady in the house. A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong, indeed, had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that the difference was not simply that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was; it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four hundred a year. This explanation, indeed, did not wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way