Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/144

132 pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it had been, she wouldn't have attempted to saddle me with any portion of it. The Mulvilles were sympathy itself: but were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their position—would it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me—whether there was anything dreadful kept back. She made no allusion whatever to George Gravener—I thought her silence the only good taste and her gayety perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a determination that people shouldn't know from herself that her relations with the man she was to marry were strained. All the weight, however, that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of the weight that he had thrown in vain. Oh, she knew the question of character was immense, and that one couldn't entertain any plan for making merit comfortable without running the gauntlet of that terrible procession of interrogation-points which, like a young ladies school out for a walk, hooked their uniform noses at the tail of governess Conduct. But were we absolutely to hold that there was never, never, never an exception, never, never, never an occasion for liberal acceptance; for clever charity, for suspended pedantry—for letting one side, in short, outbalance another? When Miss Anvoy threw off this enquiry I could have embraced her for so delightfully emphasizing her unlikeness to Mrs. Saltram. "Why not have the