or of how
_he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank
from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or
exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part
of the consensus.

Such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not having
even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch
glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at least
sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The
phenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that had
never risen to the level of sensibility. When you have been wronged you
can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have
that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your
life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your
being proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. Let me
not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral
spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she
kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew
everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all
claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing
whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--which
latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so
irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which
was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned
unconsciousness; I doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable in
a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her
husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very
different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to
amiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as such
stranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might
(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of
male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save where
consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly
deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to
which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made
the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great
decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilitie