t would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. When they met
she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
an ambitious man's impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my
dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
other the augur's wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
one's elders.

Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's
opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an