omen, whose
natures are often to themselves such unknown territory that a man who
assumes to know them has gone far to master them. He saw that a rude
moral force alone seemed to have a charm with his lady patients,--women
who had been bred to ease and wealth, and who had cultivated, if not
very disciplined, minds. Their intellectual dissipation had apparently
made them a different race from the simpler-hearted womenkind of his
neighbors, apt to judge men in a sharp ignorance of what is fascinating
in heroes; and it would not be strange if he included Grace in the sort
of contemptuous amusement with which he regarded these-flatteringly
dependent and submissive invalids. He at least did not conceive of her
as she conceived of herself; but this may be impossible to any man with
regard to any woman.

With his experience of other women's explicit and even eager obedience,
the resistance which he had at first encountered in Grace gave zest
to her final submission. Since he had demolished the position she had
attempted to hold against him, he liked her for having imagined she
could hold it; and she had continued to pique and interest him. He
relished all her scruples and misgivings, and the remorse she had tried
to confide to him; and if his enjoyment of these foibles of hers took
too little account of her pain, it was never his characteristic to be
tender of people in good health. He was, indeed, as alien to her Puritan
spirit as if he had been born in Naples instead of Corbitant. He came
of one of those families which one finds in nearly every New England
community, as thoroughly New England in race as the rest, but
flourishing in a hardy scepticism and contempt of the general sense.
Whatever relation such people held to the old Puritan commonwealth when
Puritanism was absolute, they must later have taken an active part in
its disintegration, and were probably always a destructive force at its
heart.

Mulbridge's grandfather was one of the last captains who sailed a slaver
from Corbitant. When this commerce became precarious, he retired from
the seas, took a young wife in second marriage, and passed his declining
days in robust inebriety. He lived to cast a dying vote for General
Jackson, and his son, the first Dr. Mulbridge, survived to illustrate
the magnanimity of his fellow-townsmen during the first year of the
civil war, as a tolerated Copperhead. Then he died, and his son, who was
in the West, looking up a location