n when
Evelyn was lost, the utmost respect and deference for her--how she
had been, after the first, even willing to love her had she met with
the slightest encouragement. She could not honestly blame herself for
her carefully concealed attitude of disapproval towards Ida, for she
said to herself, with a subtlety which was strange for a girl so
young, that she had merited it, that she was a cold, hard,
self-centred woman, not deserving love, and that she had in reality
been injurious for her father. She was convinced that, had her own
mother lived, with her half-censorious yet wholly loving care for
him, he might still have preserved his youth and his handsome
boyishness and health. She thought of the half-absurd, half-tragic
secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think
herself very much to blame for that. She always thought of that with
bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of
delirium. Sometimes it seemed to her now that it could not be true.
Maria realized that she was full of self-righteousness, but she was
also honest. She saw no need for her to blame herself for faults
which she had not committed. She thought of the doctrine which she
had heard, that children were wholly evil from their birth, and it
did not seem to her true. She could _say_ that she had been wholly
evil from her birth, but she felt that she should, if she did say so,
tell a lie to God and herself. She honestly could not see why, for
any fault of hers, her father should die. Then suddenly her mind gave
a leap from her own standing-point to that of her father. She
suddenly reflected that it was not wholly her own grief for his loss
which was to be considered, but her father's grief at quitting the
world wherein he had dwelt so long, and his old loves of life. She
reflected upon his possible fear of the Unknown into which he was to
go. There was in Maria's love for her father, as there had been in
her mother's, a strong element of the maternal. She thought of her
father with infinite pity, as one might think of a little child about
to go on a long, strange journey to an unknown place, all alone by
himself. It seemed to her an awful thing for God to ask one like her
father to die a lingering death, to realize it all fully, what he had
to do, then to go off by himself, alone. She remembered what she had
heard from the pulpit on Sundays, but somehow that Unknown seemed so
frightfully wide and vast for a so