Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ He had always taken for granted that Lucy was under Dora's influence religiously—had perhaps made it an excuse for a gradual withdrawal of his inmost mind from his wife, which in reality rested on quite other reasons. But his heart was full of dreams about his son. He could not let Dora have her way there.
'Oh, how different it is,' cried Dora, in a low, intense voice, twining her hands together, 'from what I once thought!'
'No!' he said, vehemently, 'there is no real difference between you and me—there never can be; teach Sandy to be good and to love you! ”

“ The father, who has suffered nothing, cannot shut his eyes to the physical ugliness and weakness, the clash of pain and effort, in which the future man begins; the mother, who has suffered everything, seems by a special spell of nature to feel nothing after the birth but the mystery and wonder of the new creature, the life born from her life—flesh of her flesh—breath of her breath. Else why is Lucy—who bears pain hardly, and had looked forward much less eagerly to the child, I think, than I had—so proud and content just to lie with the hungry creature beside her? ”

“ There was fever in it—the fever of fret and mutiny and of a starved self-love.
Dora looked at her cousin with less patience than usual—perhaps because of the inevitable contrast between Lucy's posings and the true heartaches of the world.
'Lucy, what nonsense! You're just a bit worried, and you make such a lot of it. Why can't you be patient?'
'Because I can't!' said Lucy, sombrely, dropping into a chair, and letting her arm fall over the back. 'It's all very well, Dora. You aren't in love with a man whom you never see, and whom your father has a spite on! ”

“ David hesitated.
'No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at all. Perhaps in London—'
'No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault decidedly. 'Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are. Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky for you! You don't sacrifice to it the best young brain of the nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, mon Dieu!' he broke out in a kind of despair, 'this enigma of art!—of the artist! One flounders and blunders along. ”

“ We are not our own—we are parts of the whole. Generations of workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!—sharing and giving nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second death,"—the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as this world is concerned, between us and the life of God!'
Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him—at the shining eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep emotion. ”

“ But this sturdy protection was more really a matter of roused pride and irritation on David's part than of brotherly love. It was the tragedy of Louie Grieve's fate—whether as child or woman—that she was not made to be loved. Whether she could love, her story will show; but to love her when you were close to her was always hard. How different the days would have been for the moody lad, who had at last learnt to champion her, if their common isolation and dependence had but brought out in her towards him anything clinging—anything confidential, any true spirit of comradeship! ”

“ Pigeons passed overhead, going and coming from an old farm about a hundred yards away; the sky above them had a lark for voice singing his loudest; and in the next field a peewit was wheeling and crying. The few trees in sight were struggling fast into leaf. Nature even in this cold north was gay to-day and young.
Suddenly, in the midst of their meal, by a natural caprice and reaction of the mind, as David sat looking down on slate roofs and bare winding valley, across the pale, rain-beaten grass of the moor, all the northern English detail vanished from his eyes. ”

“ The lantern gleamed on the child's huddled form, the frowning brow, the great vixenish eyes. She had half a mind to run home, in spite of Aunt Hannah. Hours to wait! and she loathed waiting.
But gradually, as the rug warmed her, the passion for adventure and mystery—the vision of the mermaid—the hope of the blue cotton—reasserted themselves, and the little sharp face relaxed. She began to amuse herself with hunting the spiders and beetles which ran across the rocky roof above her head, or crept in and out of the crevices of stone, wondering, no doubt, at this unbidden and tormenting daylight. ”

“ Lucy stitched silently, her thin red lips pressed together. She knew perfectly well what she wanted, only she was ashamed to confess it to the religious and ascetic Dora. Her ideal of living was filled in with images and desires abundantly derived from Manchester life, where every day she saw people grow rich rapidly, and rise as a matter of course into that upper region of gentility, carriages, servants, wines, and grouse-moors, whither, ever since it had become plain to her that David could, if he chose, easily place her there, it had been her constant craving to go. ”