Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/148

140 are surer to know it. Dormer's a dear fellow, but he's rash and superficial."

Mrs. Dallow, at this, turned her glance a second time upon her interlocutor; but during the rest of the conversation she rarely repeated the movement. If she liked Nick Dormer extremely (and it may without further delay be communicated to the reader that she did), her liking was of a kind that opposed no difficulty whatever to her not liking (in case of such a complication) a person attached or otherwise belonging to him. It was not in her nature to extend tolerances to others for the sake of an individual she loved: the tolerance was usually consumed in the loving; there was nothing left over. If the affection that isolates and simplifies its object may be distinguished from the affection that seeks communications and contacts for it, Julia Dallow's belonged wholly to the former class. She was not so much jealous as rigidly direct. She desired no experience for the familiar and yet partly mysterious kinsman in whom she took an interest that she would not have desired for herself; and, indeed, the cause of her interest in him was partly the vision of his helping her to the particular emotion that she did desire—the emotion of great affairs and of public action. To have such ambitions for him appeared to her the greatest honour she could do him; her conscience was in it as well as her inclination, and her scheme, in her conception, was noble enough to varnish over any disdain she might feel for forces drawing him another way. She had a prejudice, in general, against his connections, a suspicion of them and a supply of unwrought contempt ready for them. It was a singular circumstance that she was sceptical