rybody else was flaccid and the
use of things in general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a
sudden, sufficient reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even
the waiters at hotels showed the more alacrity in doing away with
crumbs and creases and dregs with struggling flies in them. This potent
charm, added to the fact that she was the eldest daughter, toward whom
her mamma had always been in an apologetic state of mind for the evils
brought on her by a step-father, may seem so full a reason for
Gwendolen's domestic empire, that to look for any other would be to ask
the reason of daylight when the sun is shining. But beware of arriving
at conclusions without comparison. I remember having seen the same
assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to persons who were not at all
beautiful or unusual, whose firmness showed itself in no very graceful
or euphonious way, and who were not eldest daughters with a tender,
timid mother, compunctious at having subjected them to inconveniences.
Some of them were a very common sort of men. And the only point of
resemblance among them all was a strong determination to have what was
pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves disagreeable
or dangerous when they did not get it. Who is so much cajoled and
served with trembling by the weak females of a household as the
unscrupulous male--capable, if he has not free way at home, of going
and doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even
without her potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might
not still have played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her
inborn energy of egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to
what she might say or do. However, she had the charm, and those who
feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being
perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her
character--the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's
rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the
same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to
the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and
be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a
moment is wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of
a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance.

CHAPTER V.

"Her wit
Values itself so