Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/195

Rh but that of their own pains and pleasures. She, indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials; but that was merely because, as she said, the mother’s instinct bade her heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son’s ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood or sympathized with his aims.

And Bessy—? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn have obeyed the world-old instinct of self—effacement—but now! He remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the ﬁrst surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen ﬁt to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the ﬁrst brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been gratifyingly conﬁrmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a ﬂaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet’s line summed up the good woman’s rule of ethics: He for God only, she for God in him. It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for that ﬁrst glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air” that he had- brought into her cramped [ 179 ]